mso2ooo - Batch Convert Microsoft Office Documents to OpenOffice Documents
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| OpenOffice.org has become more and more suited for replacing Microsoft
| Office. Sadly, porting lots of Microsoft Office documents to OpenOffice
| format (aka OpenDocument Format) is not easy. If you have only one, five,
| or ten files you could just open them one by one and resave in
| OpenOffice.org, but how about hundreds or thousands of multi-megabyte
| documents in a corporate environment?
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http://leon.info.tm/en/mso2ooo-batch-convert-microsoft-office-documents-openoffice-documents
Ecma to create standard out of Microsoft's PDF rival
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| XPS is one of many file formats natively supported in Microsoft's Office
| 2007 productivity suite and was developed internally by the company.
| Currently, Microsoft has the only implementation of XPS.
|
| [...]
|
| "If [Open XML], and now Microsoft XML Paper Specification, each sail through
| Ecma, and are then adopted by ISO/IEC JTC1, then I think that we might as
| well declare 'game over' for open standards," said Andrew Updegrove, an
| intellectual property attorney and outspoken open-standards and ODF advocate
| on his blog. "It's time for the national bodies to draw a line in the sand
| and reject Ecma 376 -- before it's too late."
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/29/Ecma-to-create-standard-from-Microsoft-PDF-rival_1.html
Related:
A File Format Timeline
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| Like any durable goods monopoly (and few things are as durable as
| software) Microsoft's largest competitor is their own install base.
| Microsoft has made many attempts at moving beyond the binary formats
| in the past, with Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. But in each
| case it failed. These were all false starts and abandoned attempts. So
| we should look for signs that OOXML is actually Microsoft's real
| direction and not another false start or dead end.
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http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/06/file-format-timeline.html
Microsoft and ECMA: Together again, doing it again
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| If you loved OOXML and the way that ECMA did exactly what Microsoft
| wanted, you’ll love the new working group around XPS, Microsoft’s home
| grown competitor to PDF.
|
| [...]
|
| The standard must be compatible with Microsoft’s implementation, which
| is the only implementation. How open. How independent. How collaborative.
| What do you think? Should we just save time and money and let Microsoft
| simply define international standards for us based on what they put
| in their products?
|
| [...]
|
| OOXML was not an anomaly, we now have a pattern. You can either object
| and do something about this, and that includes helping to stop OOXML, or
| else you can wake up one morning and find “international standard”
| being increasingly synonymous with “defined in Redmond, WA.” You have
| a choice.
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http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1699
Windows Vista Product Guide: Free to Download, $149 to Read
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| 'Windows Vista Product Guide' was released in two formats:
|
| Microsoft Office Word 2007
| The standard .doc format isn't good enough, you need to be able to
| read a .docx file, so all those users of Office XP are just plain
| out of luck on
| this one.
|
| XPS
| What the heck is XPS? I hadn't heard of it before now, (a quick
| Google tells me XPS is Microsoft's proprietary rival to PDF)
| but apparently you need a special reader for it (which is
| kindly enough built into Vista, but nothing else).
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http://itsvista.com/2006/12/windows-vista-product-guide-free-to-download-149-to-read/
Adobe could still sue Microsoft: paper
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| Microsoft's new Vista software, due to be released early next
| year, contains a version of fixed document formats which would
| compete with Adobe's PDF format. Microsoft has pledged to make
| changes to its version.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061118/tc_nm/adobe_microsoft_dc
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