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Game over for OpenDocument?

The quest for OpenDocument gets grounded by the hard realities of Microsoft Office-bound business processes. What's next for enterprise users who really want document interoperability?

By Gary Edwards and Buck "Marbux" Martin, LinuxWorld.com, 07/23/07

Page 4 of 7

The cost and disruption of a rip-out-and-replace migration to ODF at the enterprise level is impossibly high. The City of Munich, Germany, for example, spent more than $3,500 per seat to migrate from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, with most of the expense attributed to file conversion expenses and the costs of replacing business process scripts. See also Finland Ministry of Justice, Migrating a Ministry to OpenOffice.org. ("A complete migration to OpenOffice.org was not considered a practical option due to the Microsoft technology based application integrations in the document handling of the Finnish Government.")

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Yet rip out and replace is the only solution ODF vendors offer governments with high-fidelity integration and migration requirements. But as was said by one of IBM's experts in service-oriented architecture: "Because most companies have a significant investment in their legacy infrastructure, management is typically not open to ripping out and replacing legacy systems, regardless of the level of shortcomings evident in the infrastructure. Rewriting or significantly modifying large portions of a legacy environment is neither practical nor realistically accomplishable in a reasonable time frame."

It's too bad that IBM's office productivity software executives never got that memo. IBM and Sun Microsystems remain the staunchest advocates of rip-out-and-replace migration to ODF and of a continued interoperability barrier between ODF applications and Microsoft Office. They apparently believe that excellent support for ODF in MS Office would prolong the life of that product. They seem oblivious to the fact that high fidelity interoperability is key to ODF applications' infiltration of Microsoft-bound business processes.

Is there a way around this impossibly high double barrier? Yes, but it involves the use of an internal ODF plug-in for MS Office.

This should not come as a surprise to the file format cognoscenti because the internal plug-in route is exactly how Microsoft migrates existing documents and business processes to their own OOXML formats, MOOXML. Internal ODF plug-ins are simply clones of the MOOXML plug-in, installed through the MS Office 2007 Compatibility Pack in earlier versions of MS Office.