Free Report on ODF/OOXML Available

Blogger: Guy Creese

Burton Group has just published a comprehensive overview of the ODF/OOXML debate, along with projections and recommendations for IT planners. We’ve made the overview available for free (I must admit I'm not sure for how long), as we believe this topic warrants expanded industry debate before a February, 2008 ISO ballot on OOXML, and we want to help catalyze and advance the debate. 

An excerpt from the overview:

The software industry has rarely seen debates as intense as those surrounding OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (officially “Ecma 376 Office Open XML” [also known as ECMA-376 and OOXML]) during recent years. It’s a story that has many elements appropriate for a James Bond movie, with multibillion dollar business empires at risk, global political intrigue, and even some conspiracy theories at the intersection of capitalism (commercial software products), democracy (industry standards), and communism (e.g., related standards controlled by the People’s Republic of China). This is improbably heady stuff for what’s ultimately a debate about something as mundane as file formats.

The overall document summary:

Industry debate about the relative merits of OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Ecma 376 Office Open XML (OOXML) highlights the significance of the productivity application market shift from binary and proprietary file formats to vendor- and product-independent Extensible Markup Language (XML) models. The competitive stakes are huge, and the related political posturing is sometimes perplexing. In this overview, Research Directors Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly introduce ODF, OOXML, and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, and project their implications for future productivity applications.

Please note that this overview, like all Burton Group research, is a completely vendor-independent perspective; Burton Group does not engage in vendor “white papers” or other vendor-paid writing projects. This is another way to say we'll probably ruffle some vendor feathers on this one, but we've tried hard to look into this objectively and in some detail (the report is 37 pages long).

It also builds on themes we’ve covered in other recent research, including next-generation hypertext, DITA and other means of improving XML content reusability, and XQuery. Collectively, we believe these advances will fundamentally improve the ways information workers collaborate and manage content.

You can download the document on this page [http://www.burtongroup.com/Guest/Ccs/WhatsUpDoc.aspx]. Note: we will ask you to register, if you’re not a current Burton Group customer.

Comments

[Erwin Tenhumberg]

My name is Erwin Tenhumberg. I work for Sun Microsystems and co-chair the ODF Adoption Technical Committee at OASIS. People reading this blog entry might also be interested in my post which hopes to address some of the misconceptions surrounding ODF. It can be found at:

http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/dispelling_myths_around_odf

Best regards,
Erwin

[Daniel]

Have a look at this: http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/

[Jose R Rodriguez]

“better form-follows-function fit for most productivity application usage patterns.”

This report assertion is only true if MS Office is all an user has been conditioned to use.

On the other hand, even those long term MS Office users will grope with the narrow and irrelevant notion of "form-follows-function," during their transition to Office 2007.

Open Document Format(ODF) provides the core capabilities for an user and/or vendor. The open format can be extended (and made as complex as the aim of the application) by any commercial vendor (IBM free Lotus Symphony) or an free open source implementator (OpenOffice) that wishes to add value to its competing implementation --at the same time maintaining core compatibility with other competing ODF alternative implementations.

The latter is of the utmost importance in document exchange scenarios where different office applications execute in non MS operating systems --notably Unix/Linux and, yes, legacy os systems like OS/2.

Local and international organizations on non MS operating systems (yes, we are a considerable portion around the world) should not have to wait until MS decides to port their Office suite over so that we can engage in decent document exchange/collaboration. And no, an buggy ODF-to-OOXML converter is not the answer because we need a common ground to meet. That can only be attained by an ISO standard like ODF.

(Because) OOXML complexity only is implementable by the largest proponent vendor --effectively, stifling innovation and competition in that important space.

[hAl]

@Jose

ODF was standardized over two and half years ago by OASIS and still no two applications can decently exchange documents as was recently noted when a KOffice developer stated it in OASIS.
Is ODF is really much simpler than OOXML and much more interoperable (a main goal of the format) why is it that this is not being achieved.

And why should users even be required to move to a format that does not offer them any faithfull compatiblity when converting their current office files when they could be getting a format which can do just that.

You suggest that ODF contains core functionality that can be extended. However introducing such a a practise of extending a format to fit each implementation makes interoperability much more difficult.