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SlideShare is a social slide and presentation sharing website. Alexandro Colorado has set up a group for OpenOffice.org slideshows from this year’s OOoCon in Barcelona, as well as other events and presentations. (SlideShare is ODF-capable, too!)
Feel free to join the group and participate with your own presentations, or use those already posted as inspiration for your next OOo talk.
Among the many programs that can display ODF files, you can add Firefox to the list. (Though I’m not sure this is fair, since we’re actually relying on OOo in the background with the following trick.)
Mozilla Links explains how to “view OpenOffice.org documents in Firefox.”
It’s pretty easy, in fact: “you need to activate the plugin. To do so, in OpenOffice.org, select Options… in the Tools menu. Expand the Internet item, select Mozilla Plug-in and check Enable.”
Once you have set this option, you can click on a link to an ODF in your browser (with .odt, .ods, .odg, and .odp or the other extensions) to simply open it within your browser window for viewing.
One by one, states and city governments in India are adopting ODF as their standard file format:
“India has already made a lot of progress with regard to ‘open standard.’ There are about 10 states which are fairly pro-active and have made significant progress in implementing e-governance projects.
“For instance, the Department of IT, Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi, adopted the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard, and as a result has saved around 78 percent in costs by eliminating the need to purchase proprietary office suites or licenses. This has encouraged other government departments to adopt open standards instead of proprietary softwares.
“The high court of Allahabad is another case in point. It moved all its electronic documents to ODF because it felt that it was cost-effective and safe to store its documents in a format which is open and also to carry out any kind of information exchange through open standards. So is the case with the West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu governments.
“Even the Election Commission decided to migrate to OpenOffice.org after the elections of May-June 2006.”
I’m sure I have linked to the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office before, but I think it has been updated and also has a new site.
The plugin is well-integrated into MSO (it “seamlessly integrates with the Load and Save As dialog and the Save (Ctrl+S) shortcut of Microsoft Office Word”), and gives legacy users the very valuable ability to work with ODFs, which are becoming more and more common across the internet.
Click the “Get it” tab or follow this link to the download page.
A Slashdot user asks the community if OpenOffice.org users save all their documents in Microsoft formats, as a Quickoffice company executive assumes.
The results are not surprising: OOo users prefer the ODF format and tend to use it for their own documents or within their own companies. They’ll switch to PDF for sharing with outside contacts, and will also use DOC in situations where it is required. Many also use RTF or plain text where possible.
Coupled with new requirements that many governments must store their data in open standard formats (almost always, and exclusively, ODF), Quickoffice is clearly backing the wrong format here. Hopefully for them, they will be able to change course quickly enough to avoid disaster.
Tectonic breaks the good news: South Africa has adopted ODF as its government standard data format!
“Tectonic spoke to Bob Jolliffe of the department of science and technology who was part of the working group that compiled the document. He was optimistic about the MIOS document’s implementation, saying that it now cleared the playing field for the adoption of government’s free and open source software policy.
“Jolliffe noted two key features of the document, that of what defines an open standard and the inclusion of the ODF standard.”
The South Africa plan is to adopt ODF as its open data format standard now, and then use the freedom that allows to migrate its software applications to open source options over the next two years.
Its own definition of an open standard requires multiple implementations be available, which rules out MSOOXML immediately.
“Mobile Office” by SEPT-Solutions is the first ODF office suite for the Symbian platform:
“With Mobile Office, you can read those files on the road without the need to convert them to other formats as well as compromising on formatting and ODF features.”
(SoftMaker Office 2008, currently in beta, includes ODF export and runs on the Palm and Pocket PC platforms.)
Mobile Office could play an important role, as there is little representation for ODF in the mobile space yet. It’s another niche market that, added all together, will collectively create a very large marketshare for ODF and its ecosystem of editing applications.
The next iteration of Mac OS X, codenamed Leopard, will be released on October 26. Out of many new features, one mentioned on Apple’s website is native support for ODF files in TextEdit.
More broadly, this may mean that Apple has developed libraries for ODF support, which will make it easy for developers to leverage in apps they build for the Mac platform.
Once the installed base of 25 million Mac users completes the upgrade to Leopard, we’ll see another expansion of the installed base of ODF capable users come along with it!
Some time ago, the National Archives of Australia made the decision to use open standard, XML file formats for longterm preservation of digital data. Naturally, they chose ODF.
They developed a custom tool to help manage the archival process, named it Xena, and released it as open source using Sourceforge.
It’s a great example of the ecosystem growing around the ODF format, as well as how an open source tool developed for one organization’s needs can be shared online to help many others, without additional cost or effort.
There has been a recent series of discussions and blogs about the relationship of Sun and Novell within the OpenOffice.org community, and the particular roles they play. Some writers have announced the Novell is going to produce a new “fork” of OOo, while others have indicated the current status quo is not going to change much.
Charles H. Schulz, longtime member of the OOo community, attempts to clarify the situation in a piece for Groklaw.
My own opinion is rather relaxed. Sun, the project founder, has discussed their expectation that different “distros” of OOo would emerge over time. In fact, IBM’s Lotus Symphony and Red Flag 2000’s RedOffice are two new distros announced in the past few months. If Novell builds another one, I don’t see a problem. Just as competition among Linux distros has been a major reason for their rapid improvement and encouraged differentiation to serve niche markets, the same will come from a multitude of OOo distros. If each variant can read and write ODF files, compatibility will be maintained and nothing will be sacrificed for the end users.