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22 May 2008, 15:26

Microsoft will support Open Document Format (ODF)

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Microsoft has announced that the next service pack for its Office package, due in the first half of 2009, will include Open Document Format (ODF) as a save option. The update to Microsoft Office 2007 will also support both Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) in version 1.5 as well as Microsoft's competitor to it, the XML Paper Specification (XPS). But we still have to wait for Office Open XML (OOXML), an implementation of the new and controversial ISO standard 29500. This, we are told, won't arrive before "Office 14", the next complete overhaul of the office software suite. No fixed date has yet been given for the issue of this planned version but it is rumoured to be sometime in 2010.

Microsoft is also going to join the technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which is pushing ahead with the next version of ODF. Microsoft further announced its participation in the ISO working groups that are continuing the development of Open XML and that are to improve its interoperability with the competing ODF standard, already standardised by the ISO in late 2006. They also want to take care of the continuous standardisation and maintenance of XPS and PDF.

"We have set ourelves the objective of giving the users of Office a wider choice of document formats and better interoperability between those formats and the applications implementing them", explained Chris Capossela, manager of Microsoft's department for business applications, justifying the surprising move. He said increased openness of Microsoft's own products and extended participation in document formats could give developers and competitors opportunities to create added value for their clients. Capossela made particular reference to "Open Source communities".

But Microsoft can't have been driven to make their move for purely charitable reasons. Experts believe that implementing OOXML in the form of an open standard would be very difficult, if only because of the size of its 6000-page specification. There are also many reports of irregularities in the ISO standardization process. The EU Commission, which has been using the cartel law against Microsoft for years, is looking closely at events there and is examining the interoperability of OOXML. Only recently, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) officially complained to Brussels that Microsoft was putting too much emphasis on the original OOXML format and was not providing sufficient compatibility with competing products such as OpenOffice.

In a first reaction (PDF), the ODF Alliance met the announcement from Redmond with scepticism. Microsoft, it suggested, would first have to show that its support for ODF was just as substantial as that for its own existing document format. At the same time, the lobby group sees the announcement as a reflection of the "strong demand" by customers worldwide, particularly governments, for the open format. It pointed out that the use of ODF by official bodies had already been made mandatory in 14 countries, such as the Netherlands and South Africa. It added that, if Microsoft were in earnest, it could sell its Office package to official clients there too. The Red Hat evangelist Jan Wildeboer told heise online that in general it was a "good day for open standards". We now had to wait and see, he said, what kind of position Microsoft would take up within OASIS.

Why Microsoft wants to support ODF in version 1.1 and not the variant 1.0 certified by ISO is still puzzling. Standards experts including Andy Updegrove are speculating that Microsoft wish to, if only because of the already wide distribution of ODF 1.1. He said version 1.1 will also be the basis for the next version of the ISO standard. It would still be desirable, he said, for Microsoft to make Open Document Format a standard save option immediately.

(Stefan Krempl)

(trk)

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