CDF is one of the very many useful projects that W3C has been laboring on, but not one that you would have been likely to have heard much about. Until recently, that is, when Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser and Marbux, the management (and perhaps sole remaining members) of the OpenDocument Foundation decided that CDF was the answer to all of the problems that ODF was designed to address. This announcement gave rise to a flurry of press attention that Sam Hiser has collected here. As others (such as Rob Weir) have already documented, these articles gave the OpenDocument Foundation’s position far more attention than it deserved.
The most astonishing piece was written by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. Early on in her article she stated that, “the ODF camp might unravel before Microsoft’s rival Office Open XML (OOXML) comes up for final international standardization vote early next year.” All because Gary, Sam and Marbux have decided that ODF does not meet their needs. Astonishing indeed, given that there is no available evidence to support such a prediction.
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And it's not just the da Vinci plug-in that failed to implement ODF in Massachusetts! Nine months later Sun delivered their ODF plug-in for MSOffice to Massachusetts. The next day, Massachusetts threw in the towel, officially recognizing MS-OOXML (and the MS-OOXML Compatibility Pack plug-in) as a standard format for the future.
Worse, the Massachusetts recognition of MS-OOXML came just weeks before the September 2nd ISO vote on MS-OOXML. Why not wait a few more weeks? After all, Massachusetts had conducted a year long pilot study to implement ODF using ODF desktop office sutie alternatives to MSOffice. Not only did the rip out and replace approach fail, but they were also unable to integrate OpenOffice ODF desktops into existing MSOffice bound workgroups.
The year long pilot study was followed by another year long effort trying to implement ODF using the plug-in approach. That too failed with Sun's ODF plug-in the final candidate to prove the difficulty of implementing ODF in situations where MSOffice workgroups dominate.
California and the EU-IDABC were closely watching the events in Massachusetts, as was most every CIO in government and private enterprise. Reasoning that if Massachusetts was unable to implement ODF, California CIO's totally refused IBM and Sun's effort to get a pilot study underway.
Across the pond, in the aftermath of Massachusetts CIO Louis Guiterrez resignation on October 4th, 2006, the EU-IDABC set about developing their own file format, ODEF. The Open Document Exchange Format splashed into the public discussion on February 28th, 2007 at the "Open Document Exchange Workshop" held in Berlin, Germany.
Meanwhile, the Sun ODF plug-in is floundering in Belgium and Denmark pilot trials now under way.
What Andy Updegrove needs to do is provide some evidence that it is possible to implement ODF where MSOffice workgroups rule. Announcements of good intentions are starting to ring a bit hallow. We need to see some successes.
There is another side to this problem. For the past five years, the OASIS ODF Technical Commitee has brushed aside all efforts to improve ODF interoperability with Microsoft Office documents, applications and processes. If ODF is the "single file format" solution IBM claims it to be, then someone is going to have to do something about the 550 million MSOffice desktop that cannot convert their documents, applications and processes to ODF without suffering intolerable fidelity loss and costly disruption to business processes.
Five years without interop progress between ODF and MSOffice is a bit much. But now we have Sun's Simon Phipps suggesting that maybe this will challenge will be considered in ODF 1.3 or 1.5 (or why not ODF 12.3?)
Meanwhile, Sun continues to insist that ODF was not designed for interoperability with Microsoft documents and applications. Therefore Sun argues, the world needs mulitple file formats, including ISO approval of MS-OOXML.
Don't believe me? Check out the Sun ANSI - ISO vote in favor of MS-OOXML. A vote they submitted with this comment from Sun's Jon Bosak:
“We
wish to make it completely clear that we support DIS 29500 becoming
an ISO Standard and are in complete agreement with its stated
purposes of enabling interoperability among different implementations
and providing interoperable access to the legacy of Microsoft Office
documents.”
The one thing we know for certain is that ODF cannot be implemented in workgroup environments driven by MSOffice. So why not try converting existing MSOffice documents to CDF WICD Full?
And who's the looney toon suggesting that someone is trying to use CDF WICD Full as a native file format for MSOffice? The da Vinci Group believed it was possible to convert MSOffice documents to CDF WICD Full. How is this different from an export from MSOffice to CDF WICD Full?
The Foundation steps into the fray claiming that hey, if the da Vinci Group can convert MSOffice docuemnts to CDF WICD Full, then why not convert ODF documents to the same CDF profile? At least at the web platform level much if not most of the current ODF interoperability problems will be lessened. It's not a desktop application to desktop application play, but what's wrong with a web platform solution? End users are going to end up there anyway.
As with any tempest in a teapot, it's the threat to big ego's with identities and purpose of being bound to ODF success as a universal file format that roils the waters. Somebody somewhere has to put down the keyboard, step out of the blogoshpere, and start providing real world pragmatice solutions. Otherewise, those 550 million desktops will have no other choice but MS-OOXML going forward.
This isn't rocket science. It's pragmatism in the face of mounting evidence that ODF was not designed to meet the needs of MSOffice workgroups needing to convert to XML.
~ge~
http://www.universal-interop-council.org/node/4
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