Writing for eWeek, Peter Galli brings us up to date on Massachusetts’ support for ODF.
Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 38 of 58)
Here we include topics related to information exchange standards, markup languages, supporting technologies, and industry applications.
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.
Since we have our conference on Content Technologies for Government in Washington this week I probably will not get to Tech-Ed which is at our new convention center here in Boston, even though it is less than 2 blocks away. But if I had the time, I would be there scouting out the new WinFS beta and the intriguing Project Orange, (which may be relevant to the previous post on Viper). Mary Jo Foley has a list of the top 10 things to watch for there. She and others have pointed to this post for some clues on Project Orange.
As this news item reminded us today, vendors are gearing up for the launch of Vista and Office 12. We are already seeing vendors announcing support for both in various ways, but this will continue to build to a deluge of announcements over the next 6 months. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is one of the new pieces of Vista and Office 12 that bears paying attention to. While it is not likely to displace Adobe’s PDF (certainly not in the near term at least), it will certainly be used instead of PDF for certain applications. What those applications will be is something worth thinking about. There is more info on XPS from Microsoft here, including links to the specification, developer blogs etc.
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.
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.
Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium noted and commented on a great discussion of DITA and DocBook by Norm Walsh, the guru of DocBook. Norm was a featured speaker at last week’s DITA 2006 conference. Norm’s discussion is readable and lucid, and if you have been wondering about this question for a while, Norm’s post is required reading.
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.
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