February 12th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
DonationCoder.com has just published the first part of a three-part review of word processors. Part one covers the three “major word processors” in detail (OpenOffice.org / StarOffice, Microsoft Word 2007, and Corel WordPerfect X3).
The next part will cover a crop of good word processor alternatives that aren’t as well-known, and the third part of the series will cover the new category of online word processors that are getting a lot of attention now.
For today’s part, author Zaine Ridling sums up:
“Throughout 2006, I worked directly with a dozen businesses who tested Office 2007. Not a single one said they would upgrade to it. Does that surprise you? The general feeling was that Word 2007 had become a desktop publishing app, with so many features that they found their people wasting a lot of time with the new interface, unable to find their familiar features, despite what Microsoft has marketed to them about the new user interface (UI). Five of those twelve businesses made plans to switch to OpenOffice.org over the next year, while the remainder will stick with their current version of Microsoft Office (2000-2003 versions). There are more than enough reasons to use Microsoft Word, but fortunately, there are more than several great choices among word processors now.
Thus this review won’t champion a “winner,” because most of the word processors reviewed were either good or very good. With so many good choices in the word processor category, it’s impossible to say someone shouldn’t use something like TextMaker or Atlantis if they like it, are productive with it, and it suits their needs. And debates between Word and OpenOffice.org often come down to cost and control in the end for businesses; personal preference for individuals.”
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Review of Word Processors
February 9th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Glyn Moody writes Let There Be Light: Promoting OpenOffice.org with Sun, which covers the current strength of ODF acceptance and contrasts its chief competitor’s struggle to interest customers in its new products.
Moody begins: “The OpenDocument Format (ODF) just keeps on getting stronger. It is now an official ISO standard; there are numerous applications that support it, with varying degrees of fidelity, including Google’s online word processor and spreadsheet; there’s an official Microsoft-funded plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows it to open and save ODF files, and a program that converts between ODF and the Chinese UOF XML office format; and the ODF community has largely sorted out issues of accessibility that threatened to de-rail its adoption by Massachusetts.”
He discusses the great opportunity OpenOffice has right now to increase its market share while its competition stumbles, and how Sun looks set to alter its marketing strategy to help move things forward faster. 2007 is going to be a big year for OpenOffice!
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Glyn Moody on the State of ODF
February 8th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
ConsortiumInfo.org’s Standards Blog reports that an open format bill has been filed in Texas. Following Massachusetts and Minnesota, the Texas government seems headed for ODF.
The bill would require state government agencies to store their data in open document formats, and defines what it means by “open document formats.” Its definition matches Minnesota’s, and it seems clear that OpenDocument meets the criteria while MSOOXML does not.
Updegrove discusses how Massachusetts’ pioneering work has helped open the trail for other states to follow: “It will be very interesting indeed to see how this bill fares. On the plus side, the IT department of Texas will be spared the wrenching experience that the IT managers of Massachusetts suffered when they sought to put such a policy in place. Too, debate over the bill will occur in public. But on the negative, the legislators of Texas may be surprised at the magnitude of effort that lobbyists may expend on “educating” them on the issues at hand.”
Texas is the second most-populous state, and an important technology center, so the scale of this development is very significant.
LinuxWorld Australia also covers the story, and Sam Hiser analyzes it in detail.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Open Format Bill Filed in Texas
February 1st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Another huge economy and member of the EU has jumped onboard with open standards: Italy has adopted OpenDocument as a national standard.
The formal announcement is here, if you can read Italian.
Among the press, Bob Sutor, Erwin Tenhumberg and the Open Malaysia Blog also mention this news.
Jeff Kaplan predicted Italy’s move in the middle of last year.
Posted in ODF | Comments Off on Italy Adopts OpenDocument as National Standard
January 30th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Representing the OpenDocument Fellowship, Jean Hollis Weber writes OpenDocument’s Popularity Continues to Grow.
“The Fellowship now maintains on its website a Precedent page, which is an annotated set of links to decisions by government bodies. As the page says, “The list is far from comprehensive, addressing only adoption decisions reported on the OpenDocument Fellowship general discussion list and the OpenOffice.org marketing web site. The list is undoubtedly only the tip of a very large iceberg.”
Regardless of the Fellowship’s modesty, the page contains a wealth of information, and what I consider to be a large and very useful library of links to ODF implementations.
Posted in ODF | Comments Off on ODF Keeps Growing
January 25th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
A press release announces that South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has adopted OpenOffice.org on over 2,500 computers, in order to take advantage of the ODF standard file format:
“CSIR President and CEO Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, a well-known proponent of OSS and the driving force behind the CSIR’s adoption, comments: “Open document standards are of prime importance for allowing open access to information, now and in the future. By using open document standards to store our data, the CSIR is not locked into a specific vendor that developed and implemented a proprietary standard, thus eliminating the risk of not being able to access current data in future when such a standard may cease to be supported,” he says. “The maturity of OpenOffice, a powerful open source office suite that implements ODF, has in turn enabled the CSIR to adopt ODF without major obstacles,” he adds…
“The CSIR’s move to open standards will ensure that scientific knowledge produced in the organisation is preserved for posterity and that it can be accessed without limitation to specific tools. In this regard, it will empower the science community, and indeed, ultimately the people of South Africa,” Sibisi concludes.
ODF allows anyone to use the tool of their choice to open, view, change, edit and store data. It also allows free exchange of information, irrespective of the software used and it is an ISO standard controlled by the non-profit Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. ODF supports most office documents – text, spreadsheets, presentations, charts and graphical documents – and the standard is implemented by a range of applications and companies, including Google, IBM and Novell.”
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Adopts OpenOffice.org
January 19th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Rounding up a few interesting news items today:
Recently, Tamil Nadu, a high technology state in India, announced its move to FOSS for 99% of government computing infrastructure.
Now its neighbor, Kerala, is also moving to FOSS. Combined, these states have a population of nearly 95 million people–more than Germany–and both are key states in India’s IT economy.
Item 2 is an update to Docvert, an LGPL web service for converting documents like MS Word “.doc” files to the ODF standard or other XML-based formats. Anyone can install it on their own web server to convert documents, or use it as a base on which to build further software projects.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Kerala, India to Adopt FOSS, and Docvert
January 18th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The 3monkeys blog takes a look at the guts of the ODF standard.
This is the second part of his multi-part article. The first compared ODF file sizes to MS .doc file sizes.
OpenDocument is really starting to take off in products and as a focal point of developer interest. It seems the same type of creativity that is exhibited around the HTML and CSS standards is now taking an interest in ODF, which means we can expect a lot of interesting inventions and innovations to come.
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 3monkeys on “ODT Opened Up”
January 16th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Last week, Walt Hucks of Opportunity Knocks wrote Mass Plus ODF: A Winning Combination in response to an earlier Mass High Tech article ODF and the benefits of going open source.
From Mass High Tech, the greatest strength of choosing ODF is the transparency of the format’s development:
“The OASIS organization provided the forum and the transparency for interested parties to work on the problem in a manner similar to the open-source collaborative development model. The transparency of the process enabled everyone, including the commonwealth of Massachusetts, to observe the process of creating the specification and to have confidence that their needs were being addressed. As issues were identified, such as accessibility for users with disabilities, there was a forum of participation that allowed people to coordinate their efforts to efficiently find solutions.”
Hucks ties this together with some additional research into the ongoing implementation of the ODF standard by Massachusetts (of which there is little news at the moment), and the attempts by Microsoft to derail this so that their own quasi-standard might stand a chance to replace ODF. (Which would be harmful to the state’s interests, the competitive marketplace for software, and indeed, everyone except Microsoft itself.)
Let’s hope things are progressing well in Massachusetts, and that upon their successful migration to ODF, we see a few other states bravely follow.
Posted in ODF | Comments Off on More on ODF in Massachusetts
January 10th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Tamil Nadu, an Indian state with a population of 62 million, will be deploying over 32,000 state computers running OpenOffice.org and Linux.
“We have already dispatched 6,500 Linux systems to village panchayats and another 6,100 Acer desktop systems with Suse Linux operating systems are on their way. We are procuring 20,000 desktop systems for schools, which will run only on Suse Linux…” Mr Umashankar told this newspaper. He said all the ELCOT servers were on Redhat Linux and the government IT company’s 28-seat software development wing was fully on Suse Linux.”
Microsoft offered to cut its operating system prices by 90%, but they still could not match the cost of Linux-based systems, even before the cost of applications (MS Office vs. OpenOffice.org) was considered. And, lack of compatibility with ODF was another major strike against Microsoft Office’s suitability for Tamil Nadu’s needs.
In addition to all the technical and economic merits, politicians are providing high-level political support to the open source migration as well. It looks like a “perfect storm” of open source is hitting Tamil Nadu!
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »