Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Novell Boosts OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office Interoperability
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Novell today announced that the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org
> | office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format...
> `----
>
> http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061204/sfm067a.html?.v=2"; title="Novell Boosts
>
> Some commentary (and context) about this at:
>
> http://boycottnovell.com/2006/12/04/novell-supports-openxml/
Dummy bloody Novell. What planet are they on these days.
The problem isn't that SunSystems can't come up format converters,
StarOffice has the longest list of file formats of all of the Office
applications, OO certainly has a much longer list than MS has ever had. Add
to that that we are only talking about XML, is there a document reader that
can't read xml these days? OO and SO can already work in XML.
The problem is to do with lock-in because of using a format that depends on
MS. Already companies the world over have many years of archive documents
that they might lose contact with. Those documents have to be converted to
a format that is future proof.
ODF releases everyone from that. But it also means that software writers can
take advantage of the format. So someone writing say a Scrapbook
application can let it's user browse documents he/she typed seperately,
then include a relevant portion, so convertion tools required. It means
that document databases can be written where the document is data in the
database, allowing for automatic document versioning, easy and small
backups, less tapes or external space required, easy recovery.
It also opens the door for new ideas for how best to handle documents across
applications. As there are no translation problems, there are much fewer
limits on what can be done. Innovation gets to rear it's head again.
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