Gilbane Group Blog: Open Document Formats Archives

August 25, 2006

Massachusetts puts its Shoulder Behind ODF Again

Writing for eWeek, Peter Galli brings us up to date on Massachusetts' support for ODF.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 8, 2006

Microsoft Announces Support for ODF Translation tools

I could have sworn they already announced this, but in any case it was inevitable. The whole controversy is now simply not all that interesting. IT organizations need to understand the translation issues, but choosing one format over another is just not that big a deal. Many organizations have more complex issues to deal with, like integrating XML content from custom applications or other enterprise apps that don't map to either ODF or Open XML directly. We have lots more background on this.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 4, 2006

Open Document Format ISO ratified - ODF Word plugin surfaces

David Berlind continues his excellent coverage of the less-exciting-than-it-used-to-be controversy over the now ISO standard OASIS ODF vs the soon-to-be-ECMA-and-then-ISO Microsoft Open XML standard. David also reports on a suspicously timed appearance of a reverse engineered plug-in for Microsoft Office that converts Office files to ODF.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 6:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 3, 2006

OpenDocument vs. Office Open XML

Ed Dodds points us to a short but useful management-level writeup of OpenDocument vs. Office Open XML in Baseline magazine. By the way, if you don't know Ed's blog, Conmergence and you are interested in the broad application of XML to IT infrastucture, it is well worth bookmarking or adding to your RSS reader.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 18, 2006

ODF Alliance

Via Scott Abel, we learned about the formation of the OpenDocument Format Alliance. I went straight to the "about" page, which provides the current list of members. The right concentration of UnMicrosoft vendors are there--Sun, Novell, IBM, Corel, and RedHat. But there are a few interesting members, including the American Library Association and the Massachusetts High Technology Council (and yes, if you go to their Web page, that is indeed the unlikely romantic pairing of Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney chuckling in the picture on the upper left). The Mass High Tech Council caught my eye because they are a famously pro-growth organization that might not always get behind this kind of initiative. Perhaps they have suddenly realized that standards are good for growth? Or perhaps there are enough Massachusetts High Tech companies with an interest in ODF? Novell's headquarters is in Massachusetts now, but they are not a member of the Council. But Sun has a big campus here, and they are a member. So that might explain it.

Scott's article has a good roundup of related news coverage.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:27 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 9, 2006

David Berlind ACT Interview on the Massachusetts ODF Decision Video

Bob Doyle at CMSReview has once again generously devoted his time and resources to record and produce one of the events at our recent Boston conference. David Berlind from ZDNet, who has tracked the controversial Massachusetts decision to standardize on OASIS's ODF on Between the Lines (a blog you should subscribe to) in more detail than anyone, interviewed lobbyist Morgan Reed from the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) before a live audience at Gilbane Boston. ACT, who lobbies for small businesses, but also Microsoft, is against the Massachusetts decision - Morgan was gracious enough to submit to David's penetrating skepticism. Bob Doyle says he keeps this interview on his video iPod! Bob says you should use the QuickTime player. Here is the full interview, or you can choose chapters below:

Frank Gilbane - the Background

The Debaters - Morgan Reed and David Berlind

Lobbyist for Microsoft (MS) and Small ISVs

How Much Money Spent Lobbying Open Formats?

MS to Mass: Do you respect IP?

MS Press Release: Mass ODF Plan has failed!

By 2007 only ODF-compliant applications?

Does Massachusetts have any leverage with OASIS?

What if MS OpenOffice was chosen as standard?

Do MS and Internet Explorer encourage non-standard HTML?

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2005

"DITA"Help

I had flashbacks as I sat in the DITA session at the Boston Gilbane Conference. True flashbacks. Back to the days of creating a complex automated compilation "system" to create context-sensitive help for a Windows-based manufacturing control application. Partnered with an object-oriented developer who had better things to do than "play nice" with a technical writer, we managed to build a routine based on Word macros, RTF, Excel, and DLLs to output coded Microsoft help files linked directly to RC files. Convoluted, but it made us proud.

The flashback was not about the coding, although I felt compelled to document the story. It was more about the writing methdology developed with my fellow technical writers. All about standard topics, we developed a core set of help panels based on chunking information into concepts, procedures, reference info (UI and dialog box help) and glossary items. We developed a simple hypertext strategy with non-negotiable rules for what should link to what -- and when. (Ended up with a nice triangle graphic for a cheatsheet.) It worked so well that I wrote and delivered a help standards paper for ACM in.... 1993. Still lives!

So, back to the DITA session, which was excellent -- CM4 featuring IBM and Autodesk -- two real-life and useful stories of implementers from the documentation trenches. Bill wrote about DITA in practice back in October, noting that Adobe techdoc"ers" are also DITA users.

And finally, back to the point of writing methdologies (aka content strategy component,) which I believe is one of the key drivers of the rapid adoption of DITA. DITA = topics = chunking. It is as much a methodology as it is a technology. Information Mapping, Inc., well-known to techdoc folks as a longtime proponent of information organization = usability, clearly agrees. They have rolled their methodology quite nicely into Content Mapper, blending DITA in as well. Their entry into the authoring software market, full of vendors with equally strong heritage, is a good sign for those following the pulse of ECM as strategy (more on that later.)

Takeaways? Information architecture is hot. Technical writer with online help expertise = DITA fan. Getting information from those in the trenches is key -- check out What's New at Gilbane.com and register for a discussion on real-world DITA adoption on January 11th.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 9:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 22, 2005

Microsoft Offers Office Document Formats to ECMA for Standardization

The announcement is just out so our detailed opinion will have to wait, but this is certainly major progress. See comments from Tim Bray, and Scoble's interview with Jean Paoli.

Update: David Berlind has been following the OpenDocument Format debate very closely. See David's reaction.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Covenant Not to Sue

Some additional thoughts about the Microsoft ECMA announcement from Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones here, which includes some very good back and forth in the comments, including a lot of discussion about Microsoft's "covenant not to sue."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 10, 2005

Office Documents and eXtensibility

Jon Udell wrote yesterday that we should really be getting beyond the office document format debate swirling around the Massachusetts decision, because all heavy footprint authoring applications are headed for oblivion in our increasingly net-software-as-service world. (David Berlind also weighs in on the death of fat clients apps.) Tim Bray is skeptical because "... authoring software is hard." While my view of the ODF debate is much closer to Jon's than Tim's, I agree with Tim's caution here. While my coding skills were never in the league of either of these guys I have spent a lot of time working on authoring software, and more importantly, collecting requirements from users. Admittedly this was well before the Web existed, but what hasn't changed one bit, is the need for authoring software to meet a staggering array of complex user requirements. Authoring software has to be flexible and extendable to meet the always unanticipated user needs. Authoring software is hard, and differing formatting and integration requirements will keep it that way.

Note that extending software functionality is not unrelated to extending the encoding of the content, which reminds me that...

Ironically, the reason I agree with Tim here is exactly why I disagree with the ODF decision: extensibility should be the first requirement of a government decision on an open document standard, and ODF looks uncomfortably like a limited implementation. From a practical point of view, scope is critical, but as Jon says, "In theory, governments should mandate standards, not implementations." Perhaps the way to think about it is that governments should mandate standards (XML) but adopt implementations (form OASIS and Microsoft and perhaps others). Realistically there will be multiple versions (implementations) of each anyway, so a single implementation will never be enough.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 7:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 5, 2005

Open Document Formats, Religion & Democracy

Two of the topics in the title are things we normally don't touch in this blog. However, the tempest over Massachusetts’s OpenDocumentFormat decision is inflaming passions almost as much as religious and political issues do. In fact, I am writing about it because I woke up irritated at how ill-informed and irrelevant so much of the discussion about the state's decision is. (Not a good way to start a blog entry!) I promised myself not to go on for more than the length of a reasonable blog-entry, so rather than dig into all the weeds, here is a short history lesson to bring out the big picture, and hopefully keep the debate focused on the real issue for Massachusetts’s and others contemplating similar decisions.

When we (in the standards community) debated open document standards 20 years ago, there was a religious and political fervor fueling the arguments of both sides. Our side (the SGML side, which included Tim Bray and Jean Paoli, now the chief XML people at Sun and Microsoft respectively), argued that nobody's content should be held hostage by being stuck in a vendor's proprietary format, and that the solution was a standard set of rules for describing whatever kind format was necessary that vendors were free to implement. The other side (the ODA "Office Document Architecture" side) agreed with that, however they thought the solution was for a bunch of vendors to get together and agree on a format that, instead of being proprietary to a single vendor, was proprietary to a self-defined group of vendors. This solution was even worse than the status quo for lots of reasons (lowest common denominator functionality, enhancements by slow international committee, unhealthy cabal-like motivations, ...). At the time I thought of ODA as the soviet approach, and the SGML approach as the democratic approach. Fortunately, the SGML approach won, and that set in motion the developments that have given us XML today.

You can tell where I am going with this. But there is one more relevant aspect of this history to mention. One of the main arguments behind ODA was that the SGML approach was just too difficult to implement. They had a point, you have to pay for the freedom of flexibility. Their mistake was thinking there was an alternative that could anticipate all reasonable requirements. It can cost even more when you just can't implement what you need to.

The situation today is a little different, but the need for organizations to be able to do whatever they want with their own content is exactly the same. The imposition of any single schema/format on all documents in any organization simply won't work. Anybody who has been involved in helping organizations build IT applications knows that exceptions are the rule, and you can't legislate them out of existence even in authoritarian corporate environments. A good decision for the state would be to simply require all documents to conform to one of a number of publicly documented and freely available XML Schemas - who cares what software did or did not create the content or did or did not design the schema? Certainly there are some complex details to work out, but there is no mystery.

We have had debates on this topic at our Boston conference last year and in San Francisco in the Spring, where there was more agreement than disagreement between Microsoft (Jean) and Sun (Tim) and the issues raised were refreshingly free from politics. It's too bad we didn't record it.

There is plenty of coverage on this topic. We have more comments and pointers, but also see Jon Udell and David Berlind.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 7:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 2, 2005

Microsoft does the right thing with Office & XML

Microsoft announced that XML will be the default file format for Office 12. I'll look more at the details and what this means to OpenOffice etc. when I get a chance, but this is certainly great news and another major step forward for XML in general and Microsoft's support for it. It looks like Microsoft has addressed (full Microsoft press release) the main concerns that critics exposed during the OpenOffice debate we have been covering here and in our conferences. Tim is impressed!
Update: Dan Farber has some additional info from Microsoft.
Update 2: Dan points to info from Rick Schaut on Office 12 Mac XML support.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 23, 2005

OpenDocument an OASIS standard, but ...

It is excellent news that OASIS has approved OpenDocument as a standard. Hopefully it will also become an ISO standard. However, neither of these mean that it is necessarily the right approach for you. A single schema, no matter how well-designed, will not work for everyone. James Governor is quoted in the release: "One key to success will be the royalty free status of the spec; there are no financial penalties associated with developing to it." Very true, but Microsoft's schema is also royalty and cost free, and I believe they have committed (contractually even I think...?) e.g., to the EU, to keep it that way. See more on this here and here.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2005

Keynote Debate: Microsoft & Sun: What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange?

I am liveblogging the Keynote Debate between Microsoft and Sun on what is the right strategy for information interchange. The panelists are Tim Bray, Director, Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems, and Jean Paoli, Senior Director, XML Architecture, Microsoft. Jon Udell is moderating.

Actually Frank Gilbane is moderating, and not Jon, so we will hear some of Jon's thoughts as well
Frank: the session is really about strategies for sharing, preserving, and integrating document content, especially document content with XML.
Frank gave some background about the European Union attempts to standardize on Microsoft Office or OpenOffice
Tim elucidated some requirements of your data format. (1) Technically unencumbered and legally unencumbered (2) High quality (and a notable aspect of quality is allowing a low barrier to entry). Tim: "As Larry Wall (the inventer of Perl) noted, easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible)."
Jean predicted that by 2010, 75% of new documents will be XML.
Tim agreed with Jean that 75% of new documents will be XML by 2010, but asked how many of them will be XHTML (as opposed toa more specialized schema, I assume).
Some agreement by all that electronic forms are an important aspect of XML authoring, but Tim thinks the area is "a mess." I'm paraphrasing, but Tim commented on the official XForms release, "Well, it's official."
Jean commented that XML-based electronic forms are made more difficult because forms themselves require consideration of graphical user interface, interactivity, and even personalization to a degree. This suggests forms are more complex than documents. (And this reminds me of a comment Mark Birbeck made about there being a fine line between an electronic form and an application.)
Good question from the audience. So much time has elapsed since SGML got started, and we are still only have XSL-FO (which this person was not happy with). What does this suggest about how long it will take to get better, high-quality typographically sophisticated output?
Tim would suggest we are seeing some improvement, beginning with better resolution on the screen.
Another commenter weighed in, suggesting that format is important and format does convey meaning. Would like to hear that the tools are going to get better.
Frank: when do you need a customized schema?
Jean: best way to safeguard your data and systems is to have an XML strategy. You can gain efficiencies you never had before. Also suggested that the Microsoft schemas will not somehow trap your content into Microsoft's intellectual property.
Jon's takeaways: (1) software as service (2) XML-aware repositories and (3) pervasive intermediation (the content flows in such a way that you can intermediate it)

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 5, 2005

Sun & Microsoft on Open Document Formats & XML Strategy

It wasn't too long ago that all document formats were proprietary, and vendors that sold authoring and publishing software had a really unfair advantage over their customers because it was so difficult and costly for organizations to convert their content from one proprietary system to another. It was the granddaddy of descriptive markup, SGML, that led the way to the infinitely improved situation we have today with seemingly universal support for XML, and tools like XSL, XQuery etc. So, if most major software applications support reading/writing of XML, including the 800 pound gorilla of office documents Microsoft Office, hasn't the issue of proprietary formats gone away?

If you are in charge of protecting your organizations content/document assets, you better not be thinking your problems are over. If you are involved in sharing content with other organizations or among applications, you already know how difficult it is to share information without loss -- if it is that difficult to share, how easy will it be to migrate to future applications?

Our keynote debate in San Francisco next week is all about helping you understand how to best protect and share your content. While there are some differences between the Microsoft and Sun positions represented by Jean Paoli and Tim Bray, I think they agree more than they disagree on the critical issues you need to consider. We'll be looking at different aspects of the issue including technology, licensing, cost, and complexity vs. flexibility. For some background see Jon Udell's posts here and here, and the Cover Pages here. Both contain links to additional info.

I almost forgot... What does this have to do with my earlier posts on the future of content management and Longhorn? Well, Office applications, like all content applications, should benefit from an operating system that can manage content elements and attributes that could be described in XML. Would this make document interchange easier? I don't know, but it might be fun to explore this question in the session.

If you have a specific question you would like us to cover on the panel, send me an email or add a comment to this post and we'll summarize what happens.

UPDATE: Jon says he is in Jean's camp on custom schemas and Tim's on XHTML. At our Boston panel I think all of us agreed - of course neither Tim nor Jean were there. Jon is tagging his posts on the conference with gilbaneSF2005.

We are using the category and (more wordy) tag Gilbane Conference San Francisco 2005 for all our SF conference postings.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 1:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 17, 2005

Government, Open Source, and XML

Writing for WindowsIT Pro, Paul Thurrott reports that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has reached agreement with Microsoft on a license change to Microsoft Office that may have far-reaching consequences in several arenas of interest to Gilbane Report readers.

Microsoft has reached an agreement with Massachusetts that will result in the software giant easing its license restrictions for its Office 2003 document formats in return for the state dropping a previous requirement to only use document formats based on open standards. In early 2004, Massachusetts announced that it would require all state agencies to create and store information in document types based on open standards like HTML... The goal of the format requirement was to ensure that the state could read digital documents in perpetuity and not have to worry about document conversions down the road if they adopted a format that was later abandoned by its maker. However, under terms of its agreement with Microsoft, Massachusetts has revised its requirement to include so-called "open formats" such as the XML-based document types supported by Office 2003 applications such as Word and Excel.

Thurrott goes on to say that this compromise with Microsoft should be viewed as a blow to open source advocates, who would rather see governments adopt open standards for document archiving. Thurrott has a good point; I know from my own consulting that government archivists would love to have open, high-fidelity document formats to choose from. On the other hand, it is potentially good news that Microsoft will be loosening its licensing restrictions on the schemas that underlie the ubiquitous document formats.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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