Hi, The OpenDocument format (ODF) which has it's roots in OpenOffice is a good thing and it helped a lot that office productivity becomes a little bit more transparent and a step forward to become vendor independent. Ideally one standard would have been used and would evolve over time to address new requirements, features etc.
We all know that the reality is different and we have today 2 open standards for more or less the same thing, at least from my point of view. We have ODF which is an OASIS and ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006), see [1] and [2]. And we have OOXML which is an Ecma and ISO standard (ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008), see [3] and [4]. We can now argue why do we have 2 standards and can discuss the pros and cons. But does it help? I don't think so and I believe we have to live with the current situation. But this means that we have to take into account that OOXML is an important file format that becomes more and more important over time. And that we should think about a strategy to support this format better in AOO. We see growing demand for better interoperability with OOXML and I believe we can't ignore this anymore. We have OOXML import which have to be improved and we don't have an export yet. I think it was a strategic decision from Sun/Oracle to focus on an import only. I believe the goal was to push ODF and an ODF eco system which was not a bad idea. But again the reality seems to be different today and the demand for OOXML is growing. That is the reason why we will start to investigate in a better OOXML support for AOO and you will probably notice some more activity in the future going in this direction. We have already started to analyze what we have and how we can push things forward. One thing is of course the missing export and the other thing an improved import. For the import we are thinking about a bigger change to consolidate 3 different approaches in 3 applications that we have today and we plan to start a new framework. Something cleaner and better structured as what we have today and that will give us further opportunities to use it for analyzing of documents and used features, tracking of our coverage and in the end to become more efficient. Of course this does not mean that we support ODF any less. We remain strong supporters of ODF and aim to be the reference implementation for the standard. AOO committers like Regina, Oliver and Rob work directly on the ODF standard in OASIS. And it is not really about choosing one standard over another. The point is to preserve the MS interop capabilities that OOo always had, and update it to work with the latest formats used by MSO. Anyway this will be a major task but I believe a necessary and important one for AOO to continue to be the best free open source office suite. Juergen [1] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office [2] http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43485 [3] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm [4] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=51463 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
