October 5th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Here comes another office suite supporting the ISO-standard ODF file format!
Corel announces its current beta of WordPerfect Office X3 can open ODF files (not sure if it can save them, but I hope so).
Corel hasn’t committed solely to ODF, but I think over time they’ll find MSOOXML to be a difficult beast (and who knows if it will finally survive at all):
“The move toward more open standards is an exciting and positive development for our industry—but the impending shift in file formats will also create challenges…
Corel has been involved in ODF from its very beginning and possesses a solid reputation for compatibility with Microsoft Office—giving us an unparalleled expertise in file formats which we are dedicated to using in supporting our customers as they address these and other emerging file formats in a risk-free fashion.”
This represents another collection of people to whom you can send ODF files, so go ahead and start attaching them to your emails and websites!
Posted in ODF | Comments Off on WordPerfect Supports ODF
September 25th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Center Networks published a second story about my time at the Barcelona OpenOffice.org Conference, covering Louis’ keynote on features planned for OpenOffice.org 3.0, scheduled for summer 2008. Among those features long desired by the community, OOo will bundle a personal information manager (Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar extension, which Sun engineers have been contributing to for the past few years).
I also presented my own talk on Wednesday of the conference. Quoting what I wrote for Center Networks, “Titled “Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper,” I described my effort of July 2006 to collect donations online and purchase a full-page, back cover advertisement to promote OpenOffice.org in the Metro. Reception was good, and I spoke with some other community members interested in carrying out similar promotional campaigns around the world.”
CN also published my recap of the conference from Friday, its last day. While North America is seeing steady growth in the use of OOo and the OpenDocument Format (ODF), it is truly blooming in Europe. A session analyzing data returned from the voluntary user survey reached the conclusion that Europe is at a tipping point, as governments are adopting ODF for storing their data, government agencies are rolling out deployments of OpenOffice.org reaching hundreds of thousands of users at once, and desktop Linux users running OOo as part of their open source stack seem to be appearing almost everywhere.
This year’s OpenOffice.org Conference was a great success. So much progress was made in the global OOo community in the past 12 months, yet the pace is set for even faster growth in the next 12.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
September 20th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Louis Suarez-Potts and Hu Caiyong started the first day of the OpenOffice.org Conference (Wednesday) with two consecutive keynote presentations.
Louis spoke about the future of OOo in “OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Beyond” (3.0 is scheduled for release in mid-2008 and will include a large batch of new features, including the long-awaited PIM users have been demanding).
Hu Xiansheng discussed the role his company (RedFlag 2000) has taken within the OpenOffice.org ecosystem. They have developed RedOffice, an OOo-derivative with user interface and document format specifically tailored to the Chinese market. (Consisting of 80 million current users, and projected to grow by 20 million per year for the next half-decade.)
These talks and the rest of the conference are being videoed and will be available on the Kiberpipa OpenOffice.org Conference website as soon as they are ready.
My own presentation, “Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper,” took place at 4:30 local time in the amazing “Paranimf” room. About 25 attendees joined me, and came up with some interesting follow-up questions at the end. (Download my slides in ODF here.)
I’m also blogging the conference for CenterNetworks. My first post discussed the opening Native Language Confederation party on Tuesday night.
Posted in Announcements, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Conference Barcelona Begins
September 12th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Lotus Notes 8 has become very interesting to me now that it includes OpenOffice.org code and the ability to create ODF files!
From a strategic standpoint, IBM really had to do this–Microsoft has been using its power in the office suite market to target Lotus Notes users for switching to Exchange, so now IBM is taking the fight back to Microsoft. Lotus Notes 8 users will now receive daily reminders that they might not need MS Office afterall, since they’ve already got ODF creation tools right in front of them. And knowing that 100+ million new users can read ODF files will embolden users of KOffice, OpenOffice.org and others to share files in the ODF format, building market and mind-share for this key open file format.
In this context, Mike Heck reviews Lotus Notes 8 for InfoWorld and finds it very compelling on its own merits:
“Notes 8 has a clean new look, logical menus, and customizable layouts; for me, this design makes the client easier to use compared to Microsoft Outlook… You can preview documents in a vertical pane to the right, and you can recall messages — two features that Microsoft Outlook has offered for ages. Where Notes now beats Outlook, though, is in its capability of arranging messages as a conversation thread — and these can span an entire mail file, not just your inbox. Just highlight one message and all related ones automatically become part of the thread…”
I’d love to see IBM develop a strategy to get Lotus Notes into small businesses… by offering a fully open source version of the application! I think their current clients, mostly large enterprises, would continue to purchase service agreements, so existing sales would not be cannibalized. And small businesses would jump on an open source Lotus Notes, which would be much better for them than Exchange, too tightly tied to the Windows platform as it is.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Lotus Notes 8 Review
September 11th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
IBM has long been involved with the ODF file format, and has even embedded a customized version of OpenOffice.org into Lotus Notes 8, but now they’ve taken their commitment one step further and formally joined the OpenOffice.org Community.
The press release announces, “IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite’s software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.”
IBM will assign 35 developers to work fulltime on OpenOffice.org itself, and will leverage OOo technologies in other products (as they’ve already done with Lotus Notes). Sounds like a very healthy and sustainable relationship with the community will come out of this!
Slashdot discusses the announcement here.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community
September 6th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
IBM employee and blogger Bob Sutor has been a strong champion of ODF and he weighs in this week on the victory at ISO with OOXML, the past. ODF, the future.
“Congratulations to all who worked to secure this result in the goal of high quality, non-vendor dictated open standards. The story is not over, of course, as the Ballot Resolution Meeting in February will attempt to get agreement on fixes to OOXML to make it acceptable. A lot will happen between now and then. Nevertheless, this was a truly historic vote and result.
But that was so yesterday.
What about tomorrow? Well, for starters, I predict we’ll see even more adoption of ODF by governments, large and small; by users, young and old; and organizations, both commercial and non-profit. We’ll see more active development and evolution of ODF within OASIS and all are welcome to participate in that. We especially invite Microsoft and others to lend their expertise to this important standardization effort.”
The ODF camp has always offered this olive branch to Microsoft, and even now offers them the chance to work together. What kind of corporate arrogance can have a company follow the path that Microsoft has with its recent MSOOXML efforts? Trying to hijack the international standards setting process to control it, when a perfectly usable, technically elegant, and completely apolitical format, ODF, is already available? It just does not make sense!
Cheers to Sutor and the entire world of ODF supporters for heading off this challenge and for the honest and fair way they have behaved through every step of it.
Posted in ODF, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Bob Sutor: ODF is the Future
August 31st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
It’s not just ODF vs. MSOOXML in the world today, there are some other XML formats too. There’s UOF from China, and the native XML file format developed by Apple for its iWork suite, that come quickly to mind.
CyberTech Rambler investigates three XML formats in his post iWork XML Format vs ODF vs OOXML Preliminary Thoughts.
He gets inside Apple’s XML format for a close look and seems to be pleased by most of the design choices Apple made:
“What does all this say about Apple? It has the competency to implement a good XML structure for office documents. I cannot help but use this to take a swipe at OOXML. While I can see from a business point of view, participating in OOXML’s ECMA TC45 made sense, from a technical point of view, it tarnishes Apple’s reputation when one considers that it deliberated and approved that lousily-written OOXML in ECMA TC45. Also, since Apple is already brewing such an XML for its own document use, this further confirms my suspicion that Apple is there to ensure it can implement import/export filter only.”
From his perspective, OOXML is the least well-designed of the formats, and while Apple “supports” it as a (readable) format in iWork, it cannot save files into OOXML.
I don’t really care about OOXML format support for iWork, since I don’t think it will gain widespread adoption. However, I think ODF will, and I would like to see Apple’s iWork provide read and write support for ODF.
Posted in Mac, ODF | 1 Comment »
August 28th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Zoho Writer, the online word processor with (in my opinion) the best interface, has recently released an update with support for comments and its first step toward offline support using the open source Google Gears framework.
Zoho’s blog covers the release in Offline Support & Comments in Zoho Writer.
“In Zoho Writer, you’ll now see a ‘Go Offline’ link on the top. Clicking on the link for the first time will prompt you to install Google Gears. Once the installation is complete (and your browser restarted), click on ‘Go Offline’ to make your documents (both personal and shared docs) available offline. By default 15 documents are downloaded to be available offline. You can change the options by clicking on the down arrow beside ‘Go Offline’ link to download more documents. To go back online, click on ‘Go Online’ and you’ll be redirected to the online version of Zoho Writer.”
Note that this version provides read-only mode while offline, with read-and-write offline capabilities planned for a later update.
Zoho Writer has a new comments feature as well. See their blog post linked above for a video demo.
Posted in ODF, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Zoho Writer Updated
August 24th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Charles-H. Schulz mirrors the official press release for the upcoming OOoCon in Barcelona next month.
My own presentation will be held on Wednesday afternoon and is titled Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper.
This is planned to be the biggest OOoCon yet, and I am very excited to be attending for the first time!
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OOoCon Barcelona on the Horizon
August 21st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
I hate to keep writing about Microsoft, since the company is just not doing anything very interesting (in a positive sense) anymore. However, their vendetta against ODF does have a big impact on open data formats and their standardization around the world. So far, MS has delayed ODF’s triumph, but it has not and probably will not be able to stop the inevitable.
On that topic, another national standards body will probably be voting against OOXML standardization: Poland. PolishLinux.org announces a technical committee has voted by 80% against accepting MSOOXML as a standard.
It’s never quite this simple, and in fact, the original committee that produced this vote had been reduced to an advisory role. Now it’s on to another committee to make the final decision. Let’s hope they follow the first!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Poland Against MSOOXML