Oliver Bell’s weblog

The laziest type of blog post is one that just quotes a bunch of other people and adds little value in its own right, I tend to use this blog as a combination of a place to document some of my own views and a place to store my own notes as various events of interest take place, so I know that from time to time I’m guilty of over quoting.

This post is a combination of the two. Whenever Microsoft makes an announcement that is blog worthy there are generally two types of post that get generated, initially there is quick commentary on the announcement itself, but then shortly afterwards more considered words start to appear as people take time to think though the details.

This morning I thought it might be worthwhile bundling together some of the other posts that are out there, positive and negative.

So, here are a few of the more notable entries that are floating around this morning, for those interested in the topic of Microsoft and our support for both interoperability and document formats I think this makes for a reasonable round up of many of the views that are out there.

In each case I have pulled out a small quote from the posts I have linked, I would encourage you to follow the links and read the whole post though - there will always be more to digest than just my brief extract.

OpenMalaysiaBlog, Yoon Kit Yong - “Microsoft Office Supports ODF? AYE!”

However, I am an optimist, and I do hope that the Microsofties driving ODF support in core Microsoft applications are sincere in their intent. So far, I don’t see too much of the smarmy doublespeak this time in their press release, and I really applaud the guys for that. Although they tried to dilute the ODF subject with PDF (didnt they already have that last year?) and XPS (who really uses that?) and UOF (ni hui jiang ODF ma?), the message is quite clear.

So overall, its very encouraging. I hope Microsoft follows through with this announcement, and does not mess it up when they finally release the patch.

Before today, it used to be very hard in taking these statements seriously  …

“…  it is very important that customers have the freedom to choose from a range of technologies to meet their diverse needs.”
-  July 2006Jean Paoli, GM of Interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft

… but now its definitely reads a lot less hypocritical.

Kudos Microsofties, and I wish your team and efforts well

Strong and supportive words indeed from one of the louder voices driving for ODF adoption here in the region. Yoon Kit and Ditesh (two of the principal bloggers at OpenMalaysia) frequently bring a blunt sense of reality to the way that the work that we do across the region is received by the FOSS community.

I’m pretty pleased to see Yoon Kit carrying a sense of optimism around what we’re doing here, but would encourage them both to keep our feet held close to the fire as we deliver on the promises we’re making!

NOOOXML.org - “Microsoft finally playing nice?”

A press release from Microsoft now promises native ODF support in the next service pack for Office 2007, while full support for the ISO version of OOXML will have to wait until the next major release of Office. Have they finally realized that their “format war” was a lost cause, and that the formal ISO acceptance of DIS29500 was a victory only on paper? If this is an honest attempt to play nice, it is a very welcome move. Of course, only time will tell if they will deliver on this promise, but the tone has changed dramatically, and this might actually be a good time to celebrate. We wish to welcome Microsoft to the party, even though they are very late and managed to make a fool of themselves in the process of trying to fight this outcome in every way possible. Had they only made this move a year ago, it would have saved many people a lot of trouble, including themselves. It is probably safe to assume that it was the strong opposition that forced them to the ODF table.

Pretty encouraging words from a site that was originally set up to oppose the work that we did to standardize the OpenXML file format. It is unfortunate that this is still seen as some kind of “Document Format War”. I still hold a strong view that different document formats serve different purposes. Our announcement yesterday is demonstrable of that point of view, support for ODF adds to the 20+ formats that Microsoft Office already supports, and as additional customer demand comes forth I would not be surprised to see that list continue to grow over the years.

Arnaud Le Hors - “My take on why Microsoft finally decided to support ODF”

One trick they could try and pull for instance would be to put just enough support for ODF to claim that they support it but not enough for people to really use it systematically. They could then tell customers who complain something isn’t working that it’s because ODF isn’t powerful enough, and if they want the full power of Office they need to use OOXML. That’d be a sneaky way to fulfill the ODF requirement set by customers and then force people into using OOXML anyway. Sneaky but not unlike Microsoft unfortunately. So, beware.

Reading assumptions about why we’re doing what we’re doing is always fun, I would like to think that just about everything possible is on the table and out in public view at this point, anything beyond that is just conjecture.

Maybe we’re also planning to take total control of the worlds chocolate supply, after all we do have an office in Switzerland. Next time I’m attending a planning meeting in our secret pacific island volcano I’ll ask around and see what I can uncover.

Francois Ragnet - “Microsoft opens up Office to open document formats”

Interesting to see how Microsoft have moved away from their proprietary document formats, which were previously considered as their “crown jewels”, and now focus their innovation efforts on the applications themselves. More surprising though, is the fact that Office 2007 will not support OOXML, Microsoft’s own competing format for ODF, which they recently “fast-tracked” through ISO approval. In any event, this is great news for the Future of Documents, as this is a major step towards one open document format for easy interchange between applications.

François raises an interesting point. I totally agree, innovation around office suites in general from now on will come through improvements in usability, accessibility and the role of the suite as a developer platform.

Value of an office suite will increasingly be measured thorough a combination of increased individual and group productivity and the role of that suite in integrated and diverse business processes.

Jesper Lund Stocholm - “No reason anymore to mandate anything but ODF?”

A lot of people are now spinning information about this move pulling the rug under OOXML and that ODF should be mandated everywhere - but nothing could be further from the truth. The reason why we approved OOXML still stands and the incompatible feature-sets of OOXML and ODF did not suddenly become compatible. There are still stuff in OOXML that cannot be persisted in ODF and vice versa. The backwards compatibility to the content in the existing corpus of binary documents is still a core value of OOXML and this incompatibility of ODF has not disappeared. You will still loose information and functionality when you choose to persist an OOXML-file in ODF … just as you would when persisting it to old WordPerfect formats. Insisting that having ODF-support in Microsoft Office (12 SP2) makes the need for OOXML go away is a moot point - since I am sure no one would argue to replace OOXML with TXT - simply because TXT is a supported format in Microsoft Office.

Ditto. Microsoft’s support and commitment to the OpenXML format is as strong as it ever was. As Jesper highlights for Denmark, OpenXML provides functionality that is key for customers, partners and the IT ecosystem as a whole. Support for one document format will never negate the need for another that is designed for a different purpose.

Groklaw, Pamela Jones - “Microsoft supporting ODF? –Close, But No Cigar”

I wish I could wholeheartedly applaud the Microsoft announcement about native support for ODF, but I can’t. Of course, it’s better to have native support for ODF, no matter what motives may have influenced Microsoft’s announcement, and I’m glad about that for the sake of end users. But it hasn’t happened yet. Was the word ‘vaporware’ not coined for Microsoft? In any case, I’m in the “I will believe it when I see it” category when it comes to Microsoft. They’ve earned my caution.

Fair enough Pamela, it is up to us to deliver from here, no disagreement there. Enough said. You might want to look up the word ‘vaporware’ though, it wasn’t coined for Microsoft!

Alex Brown - “Microsoft Moves to Support ODF Standard”

Whatever Microsoft’s motivations, users are set to benefit from a world in which MS Office, easily the most used office software, has aligned itself with open, documented standards. But while announcementsare all well and good the true test of Microsoft’s commitment will be found in the byte-by-byte details of the files that Office reads and writes. ODF lays down some strict rules for how these XML documents must be in order to be conformant, and software exists for testing them – I look forward on this blog to holding the magnifying glass to Microsoft’s efforts to see if what is claimed to be Standard really is so. Success will deserve praise; failure will deserve correction.

Alex has an interesting (as in genuinely interesting, not as in curious) role to play in the evolution of both OpenXML and ODF thorough his position in SC34. Ultimately ISO/JTC1 SC34 will be the working group who not only lead both the evolution of these formats, but also help the world understand what interoperability between formats actually means and how it can be best achieved.

Sheri McLeish - “Microsoft Crashing The Party: Announces Intent to Support ODF And Join Standards Boards”

Wow. Microsoft opened up today, taking a nearly 180-degree turn to announce its intent to support ODF, PDF, and XPS. Overall, this is a great, positive move. While unexpected, it’s not surprising. Microsoft has been moving toward more open standards, like with its recent DAISY XML initiative. But it’s also a no-brainer. Sticking exclusively with its competing Open XML was divisive, complicating IT’s efforts to leverage the benefits that open source XML provides.

This is back to that point around the value of Microsoft Office supporting multiple standards. What I see in Microsoft’s moves is a position that is driven by market and customer demands. Following needs of the community of companies and people who use our software seems to be the right route to take, and that is really what the addition of ODF to the list of supported formats in Microsoft Office is all about. 

Glyn Moody - “Microsoft and ODF: Has Hades Gone Sub-Zero?”

As Microsoft well knows, these markets are where most of the future growth can be expected. If they are bent on ODF adoption regardless of ISO ratification for OOXML, Microsoft will effectively be shut out of the hottest markets unless it builds some bridges (one of its favourite metaphors at the moment). Supporting this view is the fact that Microsoft’s latest announcement also includes news support for the less well-known (in the West, at least) Chinese national document file format standard, Uniform Office Format (UOF).

Again - more commentary on following customer and market demand. UOF (Uniform Office Format) is a big deal for us here in Asia, our neighbor to the north is keen to see it as the principal format for documents produced in China.

Rick Jeliffe - “Success has a thousand fathers…”

Developers/standarizers on both sides need to be whacked on their heady heads with a mackeral that Not Invented Here is not acceptable. I think people accept that until now there have been reasonable excuses: that Office could not implement ODF before it existed, that Office could not use ODF as its default format until ODF had even minimal features and completeness, that OpenFormula could be syntactically incompatible with everyone else’s spreadsheet syntax, that ODF’s graphics could cherry pick SVG without really providing actual SVG compatibility (SVG Tiny please?), and so on. (Actually, I don’t mean NIH in the sense that there absolutely cannot be multiple syntaxes or technologies for the same thing if there is some historical reason or feature difference, I am primarily talking about rejecting features merely because of their provenance.) The state of the schemas for DIS 29500 mark 1 and ODF 1.0 just reveal their level of maturity and production-level adoption, and there is nothing wrong with being an adolescent. ODF and OOXML will grow up, and they need the partisan spirit and the NIH attitude to be kept under control to do so.

I left this one until last because I think it goes to the heart of where we all need to go, and how we should think about operating from here.

Choice in document formats isn’t a war, it is a discussion, different people and groups hold different views and none can be considered wrong. Participation in the development of ODF and OpenXML provides a platform for these discussions, and a forum for resolution of the technical, political and in some cases ideological issues that need to be resolved.

I personally think we’re on a good path at the moment, but will agree with Pamela’s comment that it is principally up to us to deliver from here…

There are no shortage of press and blog stories this morning sharing the news that Microsoft has committed to supporting version 1.1 of the Open Document Format in SP2 of Office 2007.

As the announcement happened while those of us here in Asia were sleeping peacefully pretty much everything that could have been said on the topic has already been said, so I thought it might be more useful to present more of a round up of what I’ve been reading this morning.

First of all a little about the announcement itself.

There is a lot more to this than just support for ODF in the Microsoft Office product, although obviously the native support for ODF is a focus for many of the words that have been written overnight.

The company also announced plans to offer greater support for a number of alternative document formats - including Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) - within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.  

In addition, Microsoft will support the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees charged with these activities. This means that Microsoft folks will join the OASIS ODF TC and participate alongside IBM, Sun, Novell and everybody else present.

Finally ODF will be added to the list of specifications that are covered by the Open Specification Promise, ensuring that every developer has access to any intellectual property that Microsoft might put forwards during these maintenance processes.

The Microsoft blogs that first carried the announcement were the usual folks.

Jason Matusow looks at this announcement in the context of the companies continuing commitment to interoperability as a tenant of the way we design products and collaborate with the rest of the industry. Jason and I share views on the issue of so called “single standards” and he eloquently explains that further in his post.

This is not about any one document format “winning” – it is about enabling customers to evaluate and use document formats that make the most sense for them. Just as the MS deal with JBOSS didn’t mean we were saying that J2 was better than .NET – it is that we want our customers to have the most positive experience possible when using our product.

Doug Mahugh talks about some of the more technical details of the announcement, as well as discussing what this means to existing initiatives. He talks about our continued commitment to the translator projects for ODF, DAISY, UOF etc. and links to the ODF Translator team blog where they have just kicked off version two of that project.

Finally Doug answers a question I was asked over dinner earlier this week… we’ll be adding APIs that allow third parties to intercept the ODF load and save paths so if anybody disagrees with our implementation then all the tools are available for them to write their own.

Gray Knowlton digs around the “Why?” question, again one that came up in my dinner conversation earler this week. Why now? Why when OpenXML just got approval? etc.

Success in our industry (like a lot of other industries) boils down to successfully addressing the needs of customers. By offering greater choice for file formats, our products address more scenarios and provide greater flexibility in enabling specific solutions. From a pragmatic standpoint, adding ODF to Office allows us to re-focus Office on product capabilities rather than a debate about file formats. We’re quite comfortable when we compete in the marketplace on these merits.

Looking around the blogosphere this morning the announcement appears to be very well received by just about everybody, as I said earlier in this post most people seem to be focused on the component of this announcement that talks about native ODF support in Microsoft Office, but it is important to recognize that this is bigger than just that one item.

The announcement, in my view, demonstrates a strong commitment to the Interoperability Principles that we shared earlier this year. As always there is still much work to be done, but this is a great step in the right direction.

If you want to read a little more then here are some links that you might find useful. There is a lot more out there, feel free to link anything addition that you find in the comments of this post.

Press: PC World NZ, Information Week, CNet News, SD Times, New York Times, itWire, Slashdot(!)

Blogs: Stephen McGibbon (MS), Jerry Fishenden (MS), Brian Jones (MS), Jesper Lund Stocholm, Richard Koman, Andy Updegrove, Bob Sutor, Ed Brill, GeekZone NZ, Joe Wilcox, Eric White (MS), Savio Rodrigues

On a final note, I feel compelled to pull one paragraph out of Bob Sutor’s (IBM) post;

There is no reason for more governments and organizations not to start mandating the use of ODF. If you are not using ODF today, you should put adoption plans in place.

There is an area where Microsoft and IBM seem to disagree.

My own personal view on this, which appears to be shared by a majority of the customers I work with, is that mandating a single standard for anything IT related is generally not a great move for government.

IT standards, like any area of technology, move on.

Governments need to remain ready to move with the technology that is in use by their citizens and businesses, mandates for information technology standards often do little more than operate as a hurdle to doing this.

Almost a week ago now Alex Brown posted the details of his “smoke test” looking at an ODF document produced by OpenOffice 2.4.0, checking conformance with IS26300 with the ODF 1.0 RelaxNG schemas, using Jing.

For most of last week nobody really seemed to care, there were a couple of press stories but nothing like the coverage of his similar test with an IS29500 schema and document produced by Microsoft Office a week earlier.

Then a couple of days ago IBM’s Rob Weir jumped in with an extremely long post that he titled “ODF Validation for Dummies“. I’ll let you read the details for yourself, while I’m interested in the detail I’m more concerned by the tone of the overall post itself - I’ll come to that further down in this text.

For flavour, here is the opening line from Rob’s post;

Alex Brown has a problem. He can’t figure out how to validate ODF documents.

As you might expect, Dr. Brown felt the need to respond to this comment and posted a similarly long post of his own, digging deeper into his objectives, his findings and his intent.

Alex’s post, titled “ODF validation for the cognoscenti” responds to several parts of Rob’s monologue, as I read through it a part headed “Negativity” caught my eye;

Amid the general downer that is Rob’s blog entry, is an assumption that I share such negative thoughts. I find myself described as “someone who would be well served if he could show that all consortia standards are junk, and that only SC34 (and he himself) could make them good”. Hmmmmm - where did that come from?

For the record, I am an enthusiastic supporter of consortia and consortium standards and know from experience that consortia contain great people who are producing some of the best standards work in the planet: XML 1.0, ODF, XSLT, UBL, OOXML (ha!) – the list goes on. Most recently I was very pleased to see a new working draft of the important new W3C XProc specification – something that SC 34 is specifically deferring to rather than attempt something similar itself. I thoroughly disapprove of the kind of oppositional mindset that sees things in a polarised “ISO vs OASIS” or “ISO vs W3C” way. In my view that mode of thinking already did enough damage during the DIS 29500 project.

Rob’s response - a hand crafted piece of XML that will validate as an IS26300 document.

Well, Yahoo! (am I allowed to use that word?)

So here is my concern.

There are literally over a billion users of office suites in the world today. These users are self selecting their favourite office suite, and at the same time choosing whatever document format is right for them.

While the debate around document formats has been an interesting one for those of us embroiled in it we have to remember that these users are the reason why we’re having the conversations, not because we have nothing else to do other than bicker with one another.

It is fascinating to watch the back and forth ping pong on blogs as points are scored, but the mentality of directly attacking an individual with the goal of proving that you’re right (regardless of the facts) really does not help anybody.

At this point it feels like we are still a long way from a scenario where somebody from the OASIS TC might reach out to Alex or another member of JTC1/SC34 to discuss the challenges that arose during Alex’s simple test, instead the goal seems to be to prove something in the blogosphere. (I’m not sure what)

Common goals around interoperability, long term sustainability of documents and simplicity for users are often articulated by all parties - but if we’re going to achieve any of those goals then the blog based fun has to end, and professional dialogue has to begin.

As he promised last week, Alex Brown has gone ahead and tested an ODF file saved by OpenOffice 2.4.0 against the RelaxNG schema for IS26300, and as you would expect the test failed. (just like his test of Office 2007)

Clearly there is still work to be done.

Again, only tentative conclusions can be drawn from a smoke test (readers unfamiliar with this term as applied to software testing are recommended to read the Wikipedia article on it before grumbling about the depth of the test, please).

• For ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) in general, we can say that the standard itself has a defect which prevents any document claiming validity from being actually valid. Consequently, there are no XML documents in existence which are valid to ISO ODF.
• Even if the schema is fixed, we can see that OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 does not produce valid XML documents. This is to be expected and is a mirror-case of what was found for MS Office 2007: while MS Office has not caught up with the ISO standard, OpenOffice has rather bypassed it (it aims at its consortium standard, just as MS Office does).

Just like the Microsoft Office 2007 and IS29500 test that he did last week the results are not at all surprising, both Microsoft and the OpenOffice.org project have work to do before either suite produces ISO compliant document files in either IS26300 or IS29500 format.

It will be interesting to see if the press try to make the same drama out of this non-event as they did out of last weeks non-event.

If you are wanting to read more on the topic then Jesper Lund Stocholm has some details of his own testing posted here, and Doug Mahugh has some additional commentary that you will find here.

Patrick Durusau, the project editor for IS26300 and the Open Document Format TC in OASIS, has posted an open letter on his site discussing the process that Ecma has been through to standardize OpenXML.

He discusses the increasing openness of the specification at each stage in the process.

You will find Patrick’s open letter here;

The OpenXML project has made a large amount of progress in terms of the openness of its development. Objections that do not recognize that are focusing on what they want to see and not what is actually happening with OpenXML.

One of the footnotes of the letter in particular caught my eye, I think this highlights some of the contention in the current debate;

[footnote #1] Granted, I have a number of issues with the current OpenXML proposal but experts do disagree in good faith even within open standards development projects. If a proposal cannot progress until we all agree, then we risk proposals being held hostage to whim and caprice.

According to Wikipedia the term FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instil in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.”

As Eric S. Raymond writes: “The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors’ equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors’ equipment or software. After 1991 the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.”

The FUD machine has been hard at work for IBM throughout this whole process,  despite loud and frequent protests that this isn’t the case.

My colleagues at Microsoft have asserted all along that much of this debate is principally driven by a competitive position between a small number of vendors, something that has again been denied by IBM.

As usual though reality does not match the words.

As an example, one by one discussions with national standards bodies here in the Asia Pacific region have been quietly moved by mysterious third party lobbying from a positive collaborative effort into a beauty competition or face-off, generally with Microsoft and our partners on one side of the table and IBM and a small collection of their allies on the other, sometimes the allies change but the pre-agreed talking points rarely do.

Events have played out in the media and in the blogosphere over the last couple of weeks that represent a breakdown of some of those anti-OpenXML arguments that have been played back so frequently over the last year.

Arguments that there is a lack of demand for Open XML, the specification is too complex to implement, the specification can’t be deployed cross platform and the long running but baseless claim that the Ecma-376 specification might be encumbered by IPR and patent threats all appear to have been cast aside as big blue steps up to meet the demands of their own customers and the market in general.

Here is a blow by blow review of the relevant activity over the last two weeks…

Thursday, 17th Jan: Brian Jones posted a blog entry talking a little about the support that Google is adding to their search products to render OpenXML documents to HTML for simplified viewing. One of the comments on that post added some facts around IBMs own support for OpenXML in some of their products, something that we had not gone looking for, nor did we expect to find given IBMs fierce anti-OpenXML stance.

Friday 18th Jan: Several of my colleagues found this point interesting enough to blog about… so Doug Mahugh, Stephen McGibbon,  Gray Knowlton and myself all went ahead and did so.  Stephen (who, like myself, heralds from the north of England and wields a great northern English sense of humour) hypothesised in his post that we might be about to see an announcement from IBM at Lotusphere in relation to their growing support for the OpenXML file format.

Sunday 20th Jan: In an article titled “Whoops! IBM products support Microsoft’s Open XML doc format” Computerworld’s Eric Lai picked up the story, to quote his article;

Nobody has invested more in defeating Microsoft Corp.’s Office Open XML document format than IBM.

So why is IBM supporting Open XML in a handful of its products?

According to technical documentation on IBM’s own Web sites, the company already supports Open XML, the native file format of Microsoft Office 2007, in at least four of its programs.

Monday 21st Jan: This is where the wheels start to come off the IBM strategy a little. Rob Weir, one of IBMs standards experts and their Chief of creating anti-OpenXML news, went out of his way to post a lengthy protestabout what he had read on the “Microsoft Blogger echo chamber”, he argued that although IBM clearly supports OpenXML in a number of their products that they actually don’t. A confusing position at best.

Wednesday 23rd Jan: In yet another confusing post Bob Sutor, a senior vice president of IBM, posted an article on his personal blog entitled “While you’re waiting, don’t save in OOXML format“, the premise of his article was that the ballot resolution meeting in Geneva may change the specification of OpenXML so whatever you do don’t save any documents in the current format, if you do the sky might fall.

If we apply Bob’s argument to the Open Document Format (ODF), or any other document format for that matter, then it just isn’t safe for us to save documents and probably never was. ODF 1.0 is the version that the world knows as ISO26300, it is ODF 1.1 and 1.2 where there have been some significant advances in the file format specification (adding many accessibility features, working hard on adding spreadsheet formula support, etc) so I guess that they probably shouldn’t be used either due to the fact that one day they will be deprecated, according to the argument.

Of course this makes no sense, technology and standards evolve, they always have and always will. It is safe to use ODF today, it is safe to save in legacy binary formats today and of course it is safe to use OpenXML as your document format of choice.

Thursday 24th Jan: It seems that Stephen’s comment around an announcement at Lotusphere about IBM’s growing support for OpenXML was less to do with humour and more of a prophecy.

This morning Stephen blogged about an announcement that has indeed filtered out during Lotusphere confirming that IBM will support OpenXML in their Lotus Collaboration and various Portal products. Martin LaMonica was the source of this story, an entry in his blog titled “IBM to take Lotus Symphony apps ‘Beyond Office’“.

LaMonica quotes Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM collaboration technologies;

“We strongly believe that an enormous amount of innovative potential has been held back by the network effects around the file formats and the proprietary control that Microsoft has had around those formats,” he said.

IBM favors ODF as a file format because it is “truly open” and technically elegant, Heintzman said.

But IBM will support Open XML, which is the current document format in Office 2007, in its Lotus collaboration and portal products. IBM already supports older versions of Office.

It is hard to know exactly how to interpret that… it appears on the face of it that Heintzman approves of the steps that Microsoft is taking to open up what have traditionally been proprietry document formats, and it is great to see confirmation that OpenXML will indeed be supported by the Lotus Collaboration and Portal products.

I need ask Stephen to suggest some lottery numbers for me…

The ODF Alliance published a report on 20th December last year that puzzled me a little. The document talked about the steps that governments globally are taking in the debate around XML based document formats, and specifically tried to outline a number of geographies where a governments had made a selection of one standard over another.

This is a debate that I have been intimately involved with over the last couple of years, and reading through the report it struck me that the data didn’t match my own experience of what was taking place in several of the countries represented in the document, presenting a slightly more one sided view than I would have expected.

When I talk to ISVs and our customers I get a picture that aligns far more closely to an interview published in Redmond Developer News today with Alexander Falk, the CEO of Altova.

One of the questions in the article does a good job of characterizing the conversations that I have been having in the commercial and public sectors recently;

Redmond Developer News: You mentioned in our previous talk that Altova has had plenty of inquiries about OOXML support, but none at all for ODF. Does that remain the case today? What kind of interest in ODF are you seeing from your customers and the broader industry?

Alexander Falk: That is still largely the case. In terms of actual customer inquiries regarding need for ODF, we have not seen any interest from our customers. What we did start to see — although very rarely — are questions from customers who are already using our OOXML features and have read articles about OOXML vs. ODF in the press and want to know if we also plan to add ODF support. But I would categorize those few questions as more out of interest rather than out of need or actual plans to implement, from what I can see.

Looking at the list of current policy positions at the bottom of this post and aligning them with recent experience, I think the following three points are worth some ongoing consideration;

1.Technology and Standards will continue to evolve, is is vitally important for any government defining policy in this area that all options are open for exploiting any new innovations as they become available to the market.

2. Achieving interoperability is rarely as straight forward as selecting a single technical standard, and many of the policy positions around the world recognize this. Applications need to be designed to work together, groups need a solid framework for collaboration and the standards need to be ready to support these two objectives.

3. There are plenty of examples from history where the selection of a single standard has not worked out well for organizations. I have some personal experience of this having spent a few years during the 1990s assisting with the deployment of several agency wide x.400 email systems.

Nicos Tsilas and I did a little further research into some of the claims made by the ODF Alliance in this document, from what we could find the majority of countries do seem to be supporting multiple standards.

I’m not sure that the ODF Alliance have mischaracterized anything in their report, but they do seem to only be telling half of the story in most cases.

Below is a round up relating to many of the countries listed in the 20th December report, you’ll find more information in a recently published fact sheet over on openxmlcommunity.org;

Switzerland: Standards group includes Open XML and ODF in policy

Switzerland has adopted updated technical guidelines for the implementation of e-government applications and recommends using both ODF and Open XML. The two standards were approved by Switzerland’s eCH expert committee following a public hearing on June 22, 2007.

Denmark: Broad-ranging national agreement embraces both Open XML and ODF

In September 2007, the Danish Government, Local Government Denmark, and Danish Regions concluded an agreement on the use of mandatory open standards for software in the public sector. Under the agreement, all public authorities, starting on January 1, 2008, are to use seven sets of open standards for new IT solutions, including Open XML and ODF for document formats.

Malaysia: Refuses to mandate a document format standard

According to reports, Datuk Dr. Mohamad Ariffin Aton, Chief Executive of the Malaysian standards body, Sirim, said there is no chance of ODF or Open XML being made a mandatory standard in Malaysia, for two reasons. First, a standard can only be mandatory when public health or safety is at stake, which is clearly not the case here, he said. Second, a mandatory standard would constitute an illicit non-tariff barrier against software products using other document formats. Ariffin said this would violate Malaysia’s commitments to free trade under the World Trade Organization. He added, “Ultimately, it is up to the general public and users in both the public and private sectors to decide which format they want to use.”

Sweden: Official inquiry considers but rejects ODF preference

An officially sponsored inquiry into standardization in the IT field resulted in this report which considered but rejected an ODF preference.

Poland: Requires neutrality and prohibiting preferences in technical procurement decisions

The National Computerization Program (“NCP”) for 2007-2010, which is a regulation implementing Poland’s IT Act, establishes technological neutrality as a central requirement. The NCP establishes this key priority to ensure equal treatment of different IT solutions in public administration systems, and to avoid preferences and discrimination among any of them.

Japan: Urges consideration of multiple standards in procurement decisions

Japan issued new procurement Guidelines for IT in July 2007, establishing compliance with “open international standards” as one criterion among others to be considered in awarding government contracts. In a public statement, the government agency in charge of drafting the new rules stated that the Guidelines did not specify one standard over another and that there was no intent in formulating the Guidelines to rule out procurement of Microsoft products.  Separately, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (“METI”) circulated a draft “framework for interoperability” that lists ODF as an example of an “open international standard,” but the document was not adopted as government policy.  Moreover, the framework specifically urged the consideration of “multiple standards” in reaching procurement decisions.

Italy: Repeatedly rejects preferences in open document formats

Various regional governments in Italy have been looking at open formats generally. None of those bills has gained much support, however. At a central level, there has also been some discussion of the adoption of ODF, but no formal action has been taken. Several organizations in Italy have considered ODF preferences, but decided against them. The National Trade Association recently made a public statement on format neutrality.

Korea: Makes ODF optional

While Korea approved ODF as a national standard, the ODF Alliance has acknowledged that Korea has refrained from making its use by government agencies compulsory.

The Netherlands: Multiple document formats can coexist

In November 2007, the Netherlands announced an inclusive approach to open standards, under which ODF will be used alongside “other document formats already in use.” Specifically, the central government must be able to read, write, and exchange documents in the ODF format by April 2008. However, ODF use is not exclusive, and the government will create a series of lists of recognized standards using a definition that should sweep in competing formats, including Open XML, culminating in the complete list by mid-2008.

Russia: Supports “widely used standards”

Russia has not implemented a national document format, but instead has taken steps to mandate use of software that supports “widely used standards.” Russia’s broad language provides the freedom to allow competing standards to thrive. In this spirit, Russia voted Yes for ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Ecma Office Open XML) and has also agreed to include ODF as part of an updated National Standardization Program.

Norway: Chooses an open-minded preference for open standards

The Norwegian government has decided to promote the use of open standards in the public sector through a gradual, phased-in implementation and expansion of an “Open Standards List.” While Open XML is not yet included in Norway’s list of approved standards, the government did not mandate the exclusive use of ODF and remains open to evaluating and including other standards. Microsoft is working with the Norwegian government and expects Open XML to join the list of permissible standards by January 1, 2009 (the date when the mandate for use of open standards takes effect).

Belgium: Enacts a transition to interoperability

In Belgium, the government approved use of ODF in July 2006. Since then, the government has been using plug-ins to enable Microsoft Office to read and save files in ODF — an even-handed approach that acknowledges that different formats can coexist and interoperate to meet different needs. Contrary to the suggestions of the ODF Alliance and others, the Belgian government’s decision on ODF is not preferential or exclusive, and Open XML, once standardized by ISO, will be considered as a new open standard and added to Belgium’s list.

France: ODF Alliance mischaracterizes government as favoring ODF

Although the ODF Alliance has claimed that France has established a preference for ODF, this is not true and is just the latest example of this group and other ODF enthusiasts playing fast and loose with the facts. The reality is that, while there is indeed a debate about mandating ODF inside the French e-Government interoperability framework task force, local and state governments and their national professional organizations are deeply hostile to such a policy given its likely negative impact on their total cost of ownership for software purchases. This is why the last meeting of the e-Government interoperability framework committee (10/12/07) ended with a lack of consensus. The next meeting is not expected to take place until the spring of 2008.

Croatia: Is open to Multiple Standards

As part of its eCroatia program, Croatia announced that it will adopt ODF and PDF as a basis for electronic document exchange by public administrations. While Open XML is not yet included in Croatia’s list of approved standards, the government did not mandate the exclusive use of ODF and remains open to evaluating and including other standards. Microsoft is working with the Croatian government and expects Open XML to join the list of permissible standards over the next several months. Croatia’s approach here is consistent with its established policy of technical neutrality and choice in the purchase of open source and proprietary software.

Germany: Allows technology-neutral advancement of standards

In August 2007, Germany voted to approve with comments ISO’s adoption of Open XML. Gerd Schürman, Director of the Fraunhofer FOKUS eGovernment Laboratory, favored Germany’s decision: “The standardization process of Open XML as an ISO standard will start now and result in the technological advancement of both standards, Open XML and ODF 1.0.”

U.S. STATES

Massachusetts: Supports open document format standards without vendor or commercial bias

In August 2007, Massachusetts added Open XML to its Enterprise Technical Reference Model’s (“ETRM”) list of approved standards, defeating calls for an ODF-mandate. In a joint statement, Massachusetts undersecretary of administration and finance, Henry Dormitzer, and the commonwealth’s acting chief information officer, Bethann Pepoli, explained that concerns about competing document standards were “outweighed substantially by the benefits of moving toward open, XML-based” standards. The ETRM articulates a vision of a service-oriented architecture where information can be shared, reused and repurposed based on XML technologies … The availability of open, standardized XML document formats without vendor bias will move us further along in realizing this vision.”

Texas: ODF implementation costs too high and credibility too low

High implementation costs helped to scuttle legislation that would have required ODF for electronic documents in Texas. A Financial Impact Report put the five-year cost of documents and applications connected to ODF in the hundreds of millions of dollars. While press reports indicated that ODF proponents privately relayed “gleaming” reports about ODF implementation in Massachusetts to Texas legislators, the same proponents refused to clarify publicly under oath that only a handful of computers in Massachusetts had actually been converted to ODF. This lack of credibility led Texas legislators, including Jonathan Mathers, chief clerk for the Committee on Government Reform in the Texas House of Representatives, to start to “question the whole bill.”

Florida: Interoperability, not premature snap judgments, should be key

In November 2007, the Florida Senate Committee on Governmental Operations acknowledged that the “most important issue for agencies choosing technology is not whether that system is proprietary or open source but whether that system is interoperable.” The Florida House Committee on Audit & Performance agreed and asserted that it is “premature” to adopt a document format standard “before an industry-wide national standard has been established.”

Minnesota: No standard mandates without careful study

The need for careful study trumped the urge for premature mandates when the Minnesota legislature opted to engage in careful study of document format standards instead of requiring state agencies to use ODF. Don Betzold, an original sponsor of the bill, questioned whether he and other Minnesota legislators had enough expertise at all to choose the technical standard: “I wouldn’t know an open document format if it bit me on the butt,” Betzold said. “We’re public policy experts. [Picking technical standards] is not our job.”

Oregon: ODF is too expensive to implement

The high costs associated with conversion to ODF contributed to the failure of legislation introduced in the Oregon House after Oregon’s secretary of state questioned the cost of converting to applications that support open formats.

Others States: Saying no to document format preferences

Efforts to require use of certain open document formats failed to gain support in California and Connecticut as well.

It has been a busy week on the OpenXML front, I have been travelling for the last few days and have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to catch up on the long list in my inbox. Three of the items stand out;

1. Accessibility. A group of accessibility experts have worked on reviewing Ecma-376 (DIS29500) and have produced a set of guidelines for developers wanting to use the rich set of accessibility features contained within the spec.

The report itself can be downloaded from the OpenXMLDeveloper site by following this link. The abstract from the start of the document reads;

This document is a guide for applications that support DIS 29500 (ECMA 376 Office Open XML) specification with the goal of encouraging the creation of accessible Office Open XML documents. Office Open XML provides a rich infrastructure for creating content that meets the needs of people with disabilities. This document’s guidance must be followed in order to ensure Office Open XML implementations are consistent with respect to their support for accessibility at both the application and output level. Authors and developers are encouraged to follow these guidelines in order to enable users with disabilities to consume content or to extract the full meaning of Office Open XML documents.

2. The Burton Group look at OpenXML and ODF. Mary Jo Foley covers this for ZDNet. The Burton Group have issued an independently generated 37 page report that looks at the state document formats in the context of OpenXML and ODF, the conclusions reached by the two authors are very favourable towards the work that we have been doing with OpenXML in recent years. The ZDNet coverage opens with;

Market researchers with the Burton Group have issued a 37-page study–not commissioned by Microsoft or any other tech vendor–that finds Microsoft’s OOXML document format to be more useful than the rival ODF format backed by Microsoft’s competitors.

The report is called “What’s up DOC?” and can be downloaded from The Burton Group here. (registration required)

3. DIS29500 Proposed Dispositions Complete. Finally, several blogs are reporting that Ecma International’s TC45 working group have hit their milestone of responding to all 3522 comments with proposed dispositions. The full report from Ecma can be found here, and Microsoft’s representative on TC45, Brian Jones, talks about the milestone here. From Brian’s blog;

It’s been a ton of hard work over the past several months, and it really feels great to move onto the final stage of this process (I need some sleep). It’s unbelievable how much work we’ve been able to accomplish within TC45. Similar to how we moved from a 2,000 page spec to a 6,000 in 2006, in 2007 we were able to respond to 3,500 comments and generated a 2,300 page document (a bit less that a page per comment) where I believe we were able to successfully handle the national bodies comments.

Doug Mahugh is a member of the INCITS V1 Committee in the US, in his review of the the proposed dispositions he characterizes them in the following way;

• Addition of useful information for developers, such as the thorough documentation of compat settings. Want to know what it means to “autospace like Word 95″ or “truncate font heights like WP6″? That’s all spelled out now, so that any developer can implement these behaviors.
• New flexibility in the formats, such as extensible page borders, support for new types of content, and new options for date handling. Want to use ISO 8601 dates in an Open XML spreadsheet? Now you can.
• Standards support. Dozens of international standards are normatively referenced in the proposed changes, making DIS 29500 a well-socialized and well-connected member of the international standards family. A good example is the use of ISO/IEC 14977:1996 (Syntactic metalanguage – Extended BNF) notation for spreadsheet formulas and fields.
• Structural changes to allow for selective re-use of specific portions of the standard. One of the proposed changes would make OPC (Open Packaging Convention) and MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) separate parts, so that other standards can normatively reference these useful technologies separately from the rest of DIS 29500.
• Clarification of numerous details, including conformance requirements, algorithms, syntactical details, and much more.
• Correction of errors and typos that have made some of the details confusing in the past.

The next six weeks will be spent preparing for the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, which will be held at the end of February. Several delegations are attending from various national standards bodies here in Asia.

Over the last few days there has been a lot of discussion in the press and on blogs about some so-called fragmentation in the world of ODF, or the Open Document Format.

Much of the press is centered on the evolving views that members of the Open Document Foundation have around what it means to be a document format in today’s world, and what the future looks like for ODF under current management and maintenance regimes.

The Open Document Foundation would like to see some significant changes made to ODF that will enable compatibility with the billions of office automation documents that exist in the world today, while the powerful corporate forces that sit behind the format in the OASIS ODF TC are not so keen, presumably because of the cost that these significant changes would force upon their development teams.

From a recent NewsBLOG post on News.Com;

“We can’t meet our market requirements with OpenDocument,” said Gary Edwards who started the OpenDocument Foundation last year. “The truth is OpenDocument was never designed to meet market requirements.”

Instead Gary and the team at the Open Document Foundation are advocating focusing their efforts on the W3C Compound Document Format which is still in early stages of development, to quote Gary again from the same article;

“The thing you notice about CDF right away is that you are not working in the confines of how OpenOffice implements lists and tables. ODF directly reflects how OpenOffice does things,” Edwards said.

So, for me the question then comes back to what this all means for policy makers across the Asia region that I have spent time discussing this topic with over the last year or so, and frankly my view is that it doesn’t really mean a great deal, if anything at all.

There has been a lot of focus on ODF in recent months, mainly because an earlier version of the OASIS led format was pushed through the ISO standardization process, then as Open XML was presented for standardization a debate started to rage over which format should be the one true format for storing office automation files. My view and Microsoft’s official position has always been that there is a need and space for multiple document formats in the market place, supporting different users needs.

In reality the push for one true format is a simplistic view of a very complex world, and it denies the lessons of that we have been taught many times by history around such single standard choices in the rapidly advancing world of information technology.

Wikipedia lists 40+ XML based document markup languages, some for specific purposes and some designed for more generic applications. Not one of those file formats will meet all use cases as we know them today in the office automation world. Even with the number of entries documented by Wikipedia editors it is not an extensive list, and we all know that the future holds additional document formats that have either not been written, or not been published as yet.

History teaches us that standards come and go as technology advances, especially in areas where significant and rapid advancements are being made. 

ODF in itself is a pretty tight and elegant standard, but in its current form it does not meet the needs of the vast majority of users of today’s office automation tools. There has been a visible but limited market adoption of the standard. To go further, as Gary very rightly points out, there is still significantly more work to be done before the ODF specification meets the broad generic needs of the 600+ million office automation application users in the world today.

Nobody can predict what decisions will have been taken and what directional changes will have been made in the world of office automation technology by the time this work is complete.

So, what does this drama really mean for the world of open documents? As I say, in my view not a great deal really, this is just the way of things.

What is important for governments and enterprises is that the way that they store their data is well documented , and that there is an assurance that they will be able to access that data many years from now using a range of implementations.

Given the repetitive lessons of the last several decades of computing have taught us, wisdom frequently involves leaving options open whenever possible. Indeed examples that I have discussed before such as x400 email or the TP4 ethernet transport protocols should lead us to be wary of writing any policy that commits to a single standard for anything.