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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 5 of 7

Massachusetts decided to go the plug-in route after conducting a year-long ODF Pilot Study. Before the Study was even complete, Massachusetts ITD realized the impossibility of the dual barriers. They issued an unprecedented Request for Information concerning the possibility of a ODF plug-in for MS Office. They wanted a plug-in that would be able to internally convert documents so transparently and with such high fidelity that there would be no disruption to existing business processes. That would allow time for a phased migration to other ODF applications as business process scripts were adapted or replaced.

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But this also meant that the ODF internal plug-ins for MS Office had to match the performance and quality of the Microsoft internal OOXML plug-ins. This is not an impossible task. Where ODF failed in Massachusetts is not with the internal ODF plug-ins, but with the big ODF application vendors' refusal to support da Vinci, which was the only internal MS Office plug-in whose developers were willing to go the ODF Community route former Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez desired.

The da Vinci plug-in could be released within a few weeks if the only goal was to add virtually perfect native ODF support to MS Word. But that is insufficient to establish interoperability with other ODF applications such as OpenOffice.org. That is because Sun Microsystems, which absolutely controls the OpenDocument standard development process, has programmed OpenOffice.org to destroy all but two of what section 1.5 of the ODF specification refers to as "foreign elements and attributes" and is busily making sure that the new RDF metadata features in ODF v. 1.2 will not be dependable for interoperability purposes. See, for example, this thread on the ODF Metadata Subcommittee mailing list.

So now we have Massachusetts and Denmark recognizing both OOXML and ODF as open XML file formats. More governments will follow. The problem with that recognition is that the internal Microsoft OOXML plug-in is the only cost effective (free) and non-disruptive way for existing MS Office-bound workgroups and workflows to move to XML.