RSSIBM, Sun to Promote OpenDocument
By Ed Oswald | Published November 1, 2005, 1:30 PM
IBM and Sun plan to hold a meeting Friday to help advance the Open Document Format (ODF), and ensure its implementation in products from many software vendors.
According to the invitation, the two companies are hoping that the meeting will clarify some critical issues that some parties interested in implementing the standard have raised. Also, the note suggests that IBM and Sun may be looking into the viability of an "Open Document Foundation."
The companies would like to ensure that all people, regardless of client or application used, would be able to exchange documents freely.
"For all these people, truly open file format standards based on XML technology provide the assurance of long term document retention and access, and the opportunity for new and innovative document solutions," the invitation reads.
The meeting will take place in Armonk, New York at the IBM Learning Center and will feature breakout sessions on various facets of the standard, including governance, technical issues and policy.
CIO of Massachusetts Peter Quinn will keynote the event, possibly suggesting that the state may be looking to Sun and IBM to carry out its plans to use OpenDocument in all state documents.
Details of which companies will be attending the meeting are not known, however it is likely that members of Microsoft will not be in attendance. The company has publicly lashed out against the format.
"We have substantial concerns, however, with the definition of 'open formats' in the current proposal. This definition mandates adoption of a single, immature format for office documents throughout the Commonwealth's executive agencies and effectively requires deployment of a single office application technology within those executive agencies," Microsoft wrote in a letter protesting the Massachusetts decision.
Micro$haft does not like competition, so they would naturally go against the open document format. I am hopeful that IBM and Sun can pull this move off, and help promote this format. Have been using Open Office for a while, and is a fine alternative to Orifice. (heh)
Score: 0
|"Micro$haft does not like competition, so they would naturally go against the open document format"
Umm...Microsoft will use open source with Office 12 and Windows Vista...multiple articles on it, wasting my time to paste any links (heh actually wasting my time being on betanews at all, lol)
Score: 0
|"adoption of a single, immature format for office documents"
i've been using open doc, so far no problemo. not sure what exactly they mean by immature..?
Score: 0
|Immature in a sense of security. ODF documents cannot be locked and encrypted like Office 12 documents will be, and both governments and businesses are scared someone will know their frauds, schemes, and criminal acts.
Score: 0
|Don't think only about a single-user appllication.
There are many companies that have their own, often custom EDI solutions.
Still, I strongly believe that MS is behind in the server-side document automation. And, that is one of the reasons why I would personally look into other server-side solutions.
Open source Open Document implementations will allow to customize document automation to meet company needs.
With MS applications, it is often a "black box" game, when you can only guess the output results. Also, you cannot fix any issues (e.g. Compare and Merge of images in MS Word documents) and have the only option to wait for the next patch hoping that it will fix the problem ad will not introduce any new problems. This patch dependancy also creates the "version hell" and YOUR customers get really frustrated because of this.
Score: 0
|lmao, i didn't catch your homorous remarks until a 2nd and 3rd reading, that's great.
Score: 0
|