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The “Impulsive Highlighters” blog has a preview copy of Mac OS X Leopard, and has discovered TextEdit will include support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
From searching around online, no one yet seems to know how deep OpenDocument support will be in Mac OS X Leopard, but the screenshots at the link above showing TextEdit’s ODF support are a promising start.
I’d like to see the creation of a wiki plugin for OpenOffice.
You install the plugin, which adds a toolbar or palate to OOo on your computer. The toolbar contains specific tools useful for browsing, making, editing and managing wiki pages. Among these tools would be an address bar, such as found in web browsers, a link manager tool, and some others.
Since OOo is a WYSIWYG word processor, the wiki would also be completely WYSIWYG. Unlike other wikis, there is no difference between viewing and editing a page; there’s no need for different modes that are accessed using an �Edit� button.
The pages themselves are stored in an OOo Base database in your home folder and can be shared across a network using the zero-conf (aka “Bonjour”) protocol.
The actual pages are stored in ODF instead of HTML, as used by other wikis. Using ODF gives more precise control over the elements on a page, and formats the pages for printing by default. Thus, it’s easy to take wiki content and print it out for sharing as hardcopy pages.
Using ODF also allows for wiki pages to be created from within Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw�something that has not been done with existing wikis, and which may add new workflows and possibilities to the wiki concept.
A small office or workgroup could make better use of an office suite wiki than an expensive, complex server-based content management system. It will cost less (since it’s free) and be easier for users to understand.
There should be a way to store a wiki on a WebDAV server such as OSAF’s Cosmo or any other.
In some ways, it’s an ad-hoc, lightweight version of the tools being developed by O3 Spaces.
(I’ve made a page to keep track of this idea here: OOo Wiki Extension.)
ZDNet Asia reports U.N. official Sunil Abraham has called for governments in the Asia-Pacific region to “seriously consider” adopting the OpenDocument Format (ODF):
“Last month, Malaysia became one of the first Asian countries to propose the use of ODF as a national standard for office documents. Hasannudin Saidin, a member of Sirim, the country’s standards development agency, said on his blog last month that the proposal will now undergo approval from a higher-level committee within Sirim.”
“In the Philippines, there is no official policy on the adoption of ODF in the country, according to Peter Antonio Banzon, division chief of the Philippines’ Advanced Science & Technology Institute, although the government agency has already standardized its internal documents on the ODF.”
In Singapore, the government has not yet made a migration decision, and continues to use Microsoft Office. However, one of its agencies is well ahead of the rest:
“The island-state’s Ministry of Defense (Mindef), however, has gone ahead on its own to adopt the ODF after it made the decision to roll out OpenOffice in 2004.
According to Mindef CIO Cheok Beng Teck, ODF offers Mindef “true” ownership of its intellectual property. “We now know [how] the XML (extensible markup language) format [is implemented in] our documents, and have the freedom to manipulate it in whatever way we want,” he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. “We are no longer tied down by the proprietary standards of a vendor.”
Computerworld reports on Massachusetts’ strategy to start its ODF implementation with a plugin for Microsoft Office.
From what I recall, the original plan was to move to ODF for document storage, and it did not specifically seek to change the applications used in the state. However, now there is an intention to start replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org in a measured rollout. It’s not being phrased that way now, perhaps as a “concession” to opponents:
“During a meeting today with state officials and advocates for people with disabilities, Louis Gutierrez, CIO of Massachusetts’ IT Division (ITD), said the state will postpone a Jan. 1 deadline to roll out open-source office applications that can save files in the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Instead, the state will on a near-term basis adopt a plug-in strategy to fulfill its policy calling for executive-branch agencies to make use of ODF.”
However, it looks like using Microsoft Office with a plugin to create ODF files is just an intermediate step. If the state is creating ODFs anyway, they ought to go all the way to using a native suite that also cuts licensing costs by 100% over the current tool! And the hints are that they will:
“The emergence of plug-ins that can be used to save documents in ODF prompted Gutierrez to issue a request for information on the technology. Now ITD will be following through with testing of the ODF plug-ins in preparation for a phased rollout, expected to begin later this year, according to sources at yesterday’s meeting.
Winske said that Gutierrez told the group there would be no mass migration to open-source office applications until they are proven to be accessible. But Gutierrez reaffirmed ITD’s commitment to its ODF policy, in keeping with its goal of moving away from proprietary formats for the long-term preservation of documents, according to Winske.”
Once accessibility reaches the state’s expectations, a migration to OpenOffice.org seems to be the next step. Massachusetts taxpayers will be among those to benefit here! Congratulations!
Bob Sutor posits that “OpenDocument is bringing a renaissance of document creation and publishing.”
His arguments are quite clearsighted. The office suite has been a fixed product for a long time, when, from the perspective of its users, it should have morphed and mutated to fit dozens or hundreds of different specialized niches. The monolith is a dinosaur, the new mantra should be “smaller, faster, and specialized.”
“I know many of you will be thinking open source here, but the existence of commonly implemented open standards that are beyond a single vendor’s control means that there will be multiple, competitive implementations. This means better, more usable features, better security (because people will compete on this element), better performance, and lower cost. It is important to remember that ODF is just one example here. We’re going to see this repeated over and over again for other standards and in many industries…”
“What will also happen will be the development of high quality SDKs created for ODF and some standard things you want to do with it. For more than thirty years, UNIX users have used a string of filters to process, analyze, reshape, and format information. The binary formats used by WYSIWYG office applications dulled our senses to what we used to know how to do.
All of this will lead to a collapse of the office suite market, but we’ll still see the creation of even more documents that are more widely used and, fundamentally, just more useful.”
This is old news by now, but there’s an extension for Firefox that allows it to read ODF files.
“Currently it handles OpenDocument text files, in the future it will handle the other types too. It is released under the LGPL/GPL.”
Very handy!
Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier of Newsforge interviews Louis Suárez-Potts about The State of OpenOffice.org:
“Suárez-Potts says that OpenOffice.org is concentrating on smaller releases that add features to the OpenOffice.org 2.0 architecture. He says that 3.0 is “on the drawing board,” but that the project is moving away from the “proprietary logic” of “big” releases, and focusing on incremental releases instead…
ODF is also pushing adoption of OpenOffice.org, according to Suárez-Potts. He says that many governments are looking to ODF as a way to ensure that they are able to access their data in the long run, and showing particular interest in OpenOffice.org as the “reference implementation” for ODF support. Suárez-Potts also says that OpenOffice.org is starting to get attention from third-party vendors who have traditionally provided add-on applications, such as accounting packages and accessibility support, for Microsoft Office…
One of the features that has contributed greatly to Firefox’s popularity is the ability to add new functionality through Firefox extensions. Suárez-Potts says that OpenOffice.org too has made it possible for developers to add functionality through extensions. The idea, says Suárez-Potts, is for OpenOffice.org to be “lean and capable, and added to easily,” rather than trying to add every feature directly to the OpenOffice.org codebase.”
According to Heise Online, Extremadura completely switches to Linux and OpenDocument.
Extremadura, a region in Spain, switched all of the computers in its educational systems to a customized version of Debian–and OpenOffice–in early 2003 (including 80,000 machines in all), and has been working to expand the use of FOSS ever since.
“A Linux distribution called gnuLinEx, which was developed in-house as a derivative of Debian, will be used as the operating system. In addition, freely available office applications running on Open Source licenses will be used. All of the staff in the administration are obligated to use the ISO standards ODF and PDF/A to share and archive documents. ODF was originally developed from within the Open Source community OpenOffice.org as a vendor-independent document format based on XML…
Vázquez de Miguel says that the region will “no longer be so exposed to the problems caused by forced migrations” after this switchover. Furthermore, he says the administration will have more input in the selection of software and be able to reduce support costs… In addition, the region expects free software to increase security and autonomy in addition to making public expenditures easier to calculate and track.”
The Open Malaysia Blog reports ODF proposed to become Malaysian Standard by year-end 2006.
From the post: “I remember meeting Yoon Kit for the first time at the 21 April 2006 meeting of the SIRIM TC4 (Technical Committee on E-Commerce) when the vote by the committee members was unanimously YES to approve the then ISO/IEC JTC1 DIS 26300, i.e. the OpenDocument Format (ODF), and in turn for Malaysia to vote YES to ISO for it to become an ISO/IEC international standard. Since then, Yoon Kit became a fellow blogger here!
Today, Yoon Kit and I, together with another fellow blogger here, Ditesh, each of us representing different organizations, were part of another historic SIRIM TC4 meeting, because the meeting now unanimously voted YES to proceed with the “project” for ODF (now ISO/IEC 26300) to be made a Malaysian Standard (acronym “MS”).
The project now will proceed to the next step of approval from the higher-level committee in SIRIM that TC4 is under, i.e. Industry Standards Committee Group “G” (or ISC G), after which there is a public comment period from September to October 2006. ISC G will look at any comments after that and raise it to the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation for sign-off to become an MS. So, I expect ODF to become MS 26300 by year-end 2006.”
They also have a cool picture of one of the bloggers, Hasan, reading a copy of Metro with our OpenOffice ad on the back!
Computerworld reports Google has joined the ODF Alliance.
“The Mountain View, Calif., search engine company officially became a member of the Washington-based ODF Alliance on Saturday, according to Marino Marcich, managing director of the group… Marcich called Google’s decision to join ‘a natural fit, given Writely’s support for ODF and further indication of momentum behind ODF.'”
The article also contains some useful background info that bears repeating:
“The ODF Alliance claims more than 240 members. Half are technology vendors, including founding members IBM, Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. The other half comprise government bodies, nonprofit groups and academic institutions, according to Marcich. Companies can join the alliance without donating money.
ODF is an open XML file format that was accepted by the International Standards Organization as a standard in May. It is being adopted by the state government in Massachusetts, and in Denmark and Belgium for official governmental use.”