IBM To Support OpenDocument Next Year 107
An anonymous reader writes "IBM announced this weekend that early next year it will begin supporting the OpenDocument standard in its WorkPlace line of products. They're planning on pushing this widely accessible format and their products in developing nations." From the article: "Rather than create an analog to Microsoft Office, IBM is offering editors for creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations within a Web browser. Documents are delivered via a Web portal and stored in shared directories. Access control and document management tools allow people to share and edit documents with others. Until now, Workplace supported the formats from open-source product OpenOffice, from which the OpenDocument was derived. Workplace Managed Client software also can read, write and edit documents created with Microsoft Office."
Good Move... (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Funny)
Do you by chance work for Microsoft?
Good for Open Document format (Score:4, Informative)
Sun support, Novell support, Google and many many less-known software vendors supports. Now you can add IBM support and see that Open Document can become a huge success.
You can read OpenOffice.org developpers' blog [go-ooo.org] to see many simillar stories of companies or organizations adopting opendocument standard.
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:1)
Does it really matter... these companies are in the business of making money; if Open Document projects become unpopular and can nolonger be used for attracting clients, profit and political footing, the idea will be dumped like DEC's PDP-2.
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:1)
Does it really matter... these companies are in the business of making money; if Open Document projects become unpopular and can nolonger be used for attracting clients, profit and political footing, the idea will be dumped like DEC's PDP-2.
That's why I said *can* and not will. For OpenDocument format to become popular, it will IMHO also need government support. The best thing government could do is force Microsoft to adopt OpenDocument support for Office.
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:1)
Agreed.
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:1)
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:1)
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:1)
So, yah. As far as I can tell XML is still the mystical format that everything supports (no matter how much of a bitch text parsing is to program).
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:1)
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:2)
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:2)
Re:Good for Open Document format (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM's support was there right from the start (making the standard). If you go here [oasis-open.org] you will see that the participants in the Open Document TC are:
IBM is also selling Workplace Documents [lotus.com], based on source forked from OpenOffice.org about two years ago. Since this summer Sun droped SISSL [eweek.com] for OpenOffice.org (which is from 2.0 LGPL only) IBM cannot just fork OpenOffice 2 and get
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:5, Insightful)
But what I'm a bit confused about, is the usefulness of having it work as a web portal. "Good" nations do have trouble with internet connections, I can only assume it's as bad if not worse in developing nations. So why create an online solution, instead of a scaled down simple offline solution? Wouldn't that fit their needs better?
If your poor, any help is good. (Score:2)
Any help requiring private individuals and businesses to use fewer resources is good.
The individual network nodes may be less reliable but the network itself is not.
Where you don't have reliable wiring, wireless can take over. This is especially true in places in the develloping world where the last mile might take years to be built over.
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:2)
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:1)
Uhm, care to name any of the nations that do not have computers with Internet access? Although 90% of the population of a country live in horrendous poverty, there are still those who have net access.
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:1)
Taking the Internet to the People [ieee.org]
Since a web browser is a rather basic piece of software, making browser interfaces to ODF documents doesn't even technically require internet access. You could work on locally stored files through the browser. Some of those 3rd world countries didn't have persistent
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:2, Insightful)
ODF in Poland (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly! I've just googled for "Open Document Format" with results in Polish only and one of the first hits is a document from the Polish goverment describing "minimal requirements for IT systems in public institutions" in Poland (text in Polish). If you scroll down to the section called "File formats" and a paragraph about text documents you will find 5 different formats: txt, rtf, pdf, doc and odf. Further details are even more interesting: requirement is that IT systems in institutions must be able to read doc documents - default format for read and write exchange of documents is either txt, rtf or odf.
Wow. I am mighty impressed: there is so much fuss about different countries/cities/states which are about to introduce some kind of such regulations while in my native Poland it is already done and it is not even news.
Cheers
Raf
P.S. And PNG and SVG are listed among graphics formats!
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:2)
(btw, I am the dev team. Before, I used to use whatever Koffice's default format was)
Re:I'm afraid... (Score:1)
Sadly they usually get their way just like the TCO issue with linux, come'on! for crist sakes! are people idiots? yes they are! MS knows this, MS knows that we (nerds) know this but still how many times do we hear their nonesense _independant_ studies where pe
The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:5, Interesting)
What does this statement mean? Did China and India use pen and paper when doing their spreadsheets up until this year?
Article on MS in China: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5197528/site/newsweek [msn.com]
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:2, Funny)
I too prefer an abacus. Though I get weird looks walking around the grocery store carrying my shopping list and my abacus......
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:2)
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:1)
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:1)
Much to the consternation of my fellow colleagues, I sometimes use an abacus to perform simple additions and multiplications. Why? I don't have a calculator lying around and the older xcalc - which used to be good - got replaced by some gtk+ calculator - which is crap.
Result: Abacus is actually more efficient for me than using the default xcalc on my Debian Sid system.
I think this demonstrates that the issue isn't open document standards or anything bizarre like that - even Microsoft believe there
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:1)
Of course they were more efficient. AFAIK you can't get slashdot on an abacus.
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:2)
Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office (Score:1)
Anyway why you pen away at your paper spreadsheet, I'll be looking for the carrier pigeon in the next few days with your reply to this message.
Government is the key to Open Document Success (Score:5, Interesting)
Strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Make Firefox display OpenDocument formats by default. I know that everyone complains about keeping bloat down, but if the OpenDocument format is going to get widespread use them people are going to have to be able to read it. Besides which, Firefox must already have 95% of the code required to do this.
2) Make a standalone MS Office to OpenDocument translator from the OpenOffice code. I want a tool so that I can drag a Word Document onto an icon on my desktop and it automatically translates it to OpenDocument format. And it should be able to do batch converting too, and to output a log of what it's done and any problems.
3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice. Concentrate on making OpenOffice a great tool for creating OpenDocument format files.
I think many people approach this the wrong way, they say things like - "OpenOffice must be able to write MS Office files so that I can send them to people that only have MS Office." However, what we really should be aiming for is to get in a position so that anyone can happily say "Please send us the document in OpenOffice format" and so that if someone says "Can you send it in Word" you can say "Download Firefox - it reads all OpenOffice files."
People are going to criticise this as unrealistic, but these are exactly the type of strategies that Microsoft used to get their desktop dominance.
Re:Strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
I promise you the average user does not want to go through a convoluted process to edit their existing docs, they just want to hit Open...
Keep in mind one of the ways MS Word overtook WordPerfect was by supporting the opening of WordPerfect files
Re:Strategy (Score:2)
I strongly disagree. I think MS Office support is the kiss of death for OpenOffice, mainly because it encourages the continued use of MS formats and makes OpenOffice appear to be an (inferior) subtitute for MS Office.
Having people open an MS Word document in OpenOffice and then saving it again in Word format is just crazy, and yet this is what OpenOffice (inadvertantly) encourages people to do. Some issues
Firstly, it puts an increadable bu
Re:Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
Messing around with an external converter would piss me off, possibly enough that I'd write a patch to make open office automati
Re:Strategy (Score:1)
People share documents in editable form so that changes can be made by all participants. There is no other reason for a standard.
I think that the wiki is the better alternative to all of these applications.
1) You can secure a wiki by resticting participants.
2) You can make the wiki available to anyone with a browser regardless of the systems OS or hardware.
3) You can
Re:Strategy (Score:2)
I assume by this you mean MS Office is the standard... What I'm talking about is changing people's attitudes so that OpenDocument is the standard.
Yes, wiki's are nice. Wouldn't it be great if you could edit your wiki in OpenDocument format in OpenOffice, and you could view it Firefox? Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Re:Strategy (Score:1)
You need compatibility with mainstream product in order to enter the market.
Re:Strategy (Score:2)
You need compatibility with mainstream product in order to enter the market.
I don't think you need 2-way compatibility, though. As I recall, Microsoft Word could only open Wordperfect files, but not save them in the Wordperfect format. Why doesn't OO.o do the same?
Re:Strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
"Sorry, Firefox is not in our default installation and I'm not authorized to install software (and IT will not support it)." Send them a document they can't open once, they get slightly annoyed. If they reply asking for a document in Word, and you still can't provide, they are considerably annoyed. If it was your jobb application, you're probably dropped at this point. If not, you're probably already marked as a "difficult" customer.
If you want to get to that position, you shouldn't be so quick to shoot yourself in the foot. What you are describing is a good strategy to close a market - to get you from largest player (maybe 30-50%?) to monopoly. It's probably one of the worst ideas for gaining initial market share, since you'll see more abandonment (OO can't interoperate with anything, I'm getting MS Office) than converts.
Re:Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, of course in that kind of situation then the only thing to do is to send them a Word document, (or better - a PDF).
But it misses my point, it's about mindshare and attitude - we need to get to a point where people and companies will start to feel embarrassed that they can't read OpenDocument formats.
Re:Strategy (Score:1)
BTW - now you can upload the file into us and send the recalcitrant user a link instead of a word file, if you like. That's why we wrote Writely the way we did, so that the "I can't use it, I can't install software" excuse doesn't work.
Re:Strategy (Score:2)
I think this can be done without dropping support for any format in OpenOffice.org. When the document is not too large, it can be sent in several formats at once. When there are no specific requirements, I usually send people both OpenDocument and PDF versions of my documents - that way, almost anyone should be able to re
Re:Strategy (Score:2)
Of course, what I really want to see is a Word macro for reading ODF. That shouldn't really be all that hard, since ODF is easy and Word's macro system obviously w
Re:Strategy (Score:3, Funny)
Not really. I regularly open documents written in Wordperfect 5.1 in Word.
Re:Strategy (Score:2)
Re:Strategy (Score:3, Interesting)
Those are the things MS did to
Re:Strategy (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
Same argument I used to hear when I was running OS/2: "Don't buy WordPerfect 7 (probably the last Win 3.1 version) that would run on WinOS/2, buy an OS/2 word processor.
We can see how well that worked out. The important thing is that IBM (gulp) is helping to promote a _new_ standard.
Unrealistic, my foot. (Score:1)
2) Make a standalone MS Office to OpenDocument translator from the OpenOffice code.
3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice.
No it's not. Internet Explorer doesn't display Office formats by default and never has. There is no standlone other-to-Office translator and there never has been. And Microsoft initially had strong support for just about
Re:Unrealistic, my foot. (Score:2)
I said "type of" not "literally the same". IE wasn't even around when Microsoft was building its Office monopoly.
There is no standlone other-to-Office translator and there never has been.
So? Personally I think it would be a good thing to be able to translate directories full of MS Office documents into OpenDocument format.
And Microsoft initially had strong support for just about all of the competing formats so that people had upgrad
Re:Strategy (Score:1)
Re:Strategy (Score:2)
That would kill OpenOffice instantly. Even OpenOffice fans (like me) could no longer use it.
I agree on 1 and 2, though.
Great (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:1)
almost everything? (Score:2)
Ethernet - Not invented by IBM (NIBIBM)
Mouse - NIBIBM
GUI - NIBIBM
C/C++,Java and just about every computer language in use today - NIBIBM
Unix - NIBIBM
Laser Printers - NIBIBM
.
.
IBM was a symbol of the computing age. Just not in the last 20 years.
Re:Great (Score:1)
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:2)
Furthermore, it can assist in putting pressure on developers to add support for the format (see: snowball effect).
The usual question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, this is good news for the linux community, as much as it is good news for people who use lots of other operating systems which do not run certain proprietary programs. Most of all, it is good news for anybody interested in using an open format instead of a proprietary format, regardless of the platform which may or may not be proprietary.
Open Document Format != Open Source (Score:4, Informative)
ODF is a format for saving documents. It is platform independent and there is no reason why it should not be used by any application that creates documents, whether open or closed source.
Another crack in the dike... (Score:3, Interesting)
Several national governments are now mandating Open formats for thier documents, spreadsheets, etc. The more they are adopted, the more Bill and Company will have to compete on quality, features and price, not "Only we are 100% compatible with our proprietary format".
Now, if we can only convince the the Feds, or at least several more states, to make OD format the standard, we can make real progress. After all, most of Bill's bucks come from the US, and if we don't get the changes made here, we have so much less impact.
My 2 cents.
Re:Another crack in the dike... (Score:1)
Re:Another crack in the dike... (Score:1)
Quality and features are exactly the things that OO.o has been unable to compete on. That's why they developed OpenDoc (based on what was already the OO.o format, so it's not like there was much work there) so that they could compete simply ba
Re:Another crack in the dike... (Score:2)
That may be, but you are completely missing the point of having open standards.
This is not about "open source must crush Microsoft at any cost!" This is about making information available in a format that a single company does not control.
If Microsoft were to fully support the OpenDocument format in the next version of Office, the
Re:Another crack in the dike... (Score:1)
I beg to differ. While OOo may not be "cutting edge" on all features, it is mature and stable, more so than many office suites of just a few years ago.
And that's the problem
Actually, this isn't a Web browser implementation (Score:5, Informative)
The point about the ODF support is that, like all standards, it takes interoperability out of the equation and lets vendors compete on the implementations. OpenOffice is essentially a MS Office competitor, using the same desktop-centric deployment and support model, except with open source and cross-OS capabilities. This is good for folks who like the MS Office "way" but want choice. IBM is approaching the problem of desktop productivity tools a little differently, as a locally installed but network managed app. Again, innovating in the implementation because the standard lets you do that.
IBM Office Suite. (Score:2, Interesting)
--saint
Re:IBM Office Suite. (Score:1)
Re:IBM Office Suite. (Score:2)
Interestingly, they still have pages on SmartSuite for OS/2 [ibm.com], but the "Buy now" link returns a 404.
Re:IBM Office Suite. (Score:1)
Oh Wow! (Score:2)
Oh, wow! I almost get the feeling that OpenDocument just appeared in final form and IBM is an early adopter -- NOT!
IBM is smart to try this in developing countries (Score:1)
I have been using alternative desktop environments for the past twenty years. For many years, I
Re:Web 2.0. (Score:1)
Ah, nothing like a good cup of buzz in the morning.
Re:Web 2.0. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a hint: throwing around buzzwords doesn't indicate you actually said anything.
Re:Web 2.0. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Web 2.0. (Score:2)
"Web transforms" first, everything changes, including the web, so this is hardly groundbreaking. X transforms is pretty much true for any X, so even though you seem to think otherwise you actually say nothing specifically about the web. It's not a new insigth that the world is in constant change.
"contentful" must be a word you invented on the spot, as marketing loves to do. Can't possibly mean an
Re:Web 2.0. (Score:2)
Downside: It is a service which they can charge for, so my OpenOffice will be cheaper in the long run. Lets say two hours to download, install and configure per year, at $30 per hour= $60 per year for this online product.
It is an ideal office product though, just plug in a server or two for this application and you are done. Upgrade: Overnight for everybody, and everybody will have the same response, same bugs, so better to solve issues.
Re:Web 2.0. (Score:1)
Re:Are open documents really an issue? (Score:1, Funny)
Then you will have no problem implementing a
Re:Are open documents really an issue? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Anyways, with MS going to an XML document base, it is moot to believe their is a need for an open document format. XML IS OPEN, I mean, its a text document in a highly structured standardized format. The tags might mean something different from document to document, but XML is inherently an even easier document format to reverse engineer. By MS going with XML, they are almost implicating that they don't care about proprietary documents anymore.
First, MS has been calling their new format "Open-XML." Now I
Re:Are open documents really an issue? (Score:1)
"Open" is hardly a new buzzword - they've been using it all over the past few decades. Usually, of course, "open" meaning "you can actually buy the specification and implement it yourself if you want to". It's only in the last decade when the grassroots sense has been rising, as in "you can get the whole specification free of charge and no strings attached, too".
Plus, I think [livejournal.com] it's a silly thing to stick "open" to the project title, especially in open source projects. But that's just me.
And yes, I agree
feed the troll (Score:1)
Your main argument here is just patently false. Most word processors does not interoperate just fine. No wp program can read MS office documents right. Openoffice 1.x does not convert documents too good, and even though it is better with 2.0, it is still not perfect. This is exactly why people buy MS office. MS office has no way of reading Openoffice documents. So both ways the conversion is just not there. It is