Andy Updegrove, Author at ConsortiumInfo.org - Page 56 of 75ConsortiumInfo.org

Microsoft Falls Back Again: Announces ODF Plugin Project

7/06/2006

In the latest in a series of concessions to the rising popularity of ODF, Microsoft announced yesterday that it has quietly been supporting the development of its own set of plugins to enable conversion of documents to and from Microsoft Office to software products that support ODF. The news is being treated in the press as "new news," but in fact Ray Ozzie let slip mention of the project last October, and an open source converter project was started by the same French company last September 26. I'll more to say about this below, but first, let's briefly review what the press release has to say.

The new converter tools will be made available under the BSD open source license, and will be made "broadly available to the industry for use with other individual or commercial projects to accelerate document interoperability and expand customer choice between Open XML and other technologies." The tools will also be available as free downloads for use with older versions of Office, and are being created in cooperation with several partners: French IT solution provider Clever Age, and "several independent software vendors, including Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany." A prototype of the first converter (for MS Word) has already been contributed to an open source project at SourceForge.net.

While Microsoft had previously stated that there was insufficient customer interest in ODF to justify supporting ODF in Office, it explains this partial concession in its press release as follows:

This work is in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format…"By enabling this translator, we will make both choice and interoperability a more practical option for our customers," said Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft.

The Emerging ODF Environment, Part IV: Spotlight on SoftMaker Office 2006

7/05/2006

In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, SoftMaker Product Manager, of Germany's SoftMaker Software GmbH. Unlike some of the other products profiled so far, SoftMaker Office 2006 currently includes only word processor and spreadsheet functions and is still bringing its product up to full ODF compliance.

While SoftMaker Office is not as well known outside of Germany as KOfiice, another German ODF-compliant software suite, it has a number of interesting and useful unique features, as does each of the other suites that I have featured in this series of interviews. Perhaps most interesting is its availability on mobile devices, and the fact that it has been selected by AMD for bundling with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015.

And that, of course, is the point of this series of interviews: presenting each competing product in detail illustrates the rich environment of applications and tools that are evolving around the OpenDocument Format (ODF) specification developed by OASIS, and now adopted by ISO/IEC. (The prior interviews can be found as follows: with Inge Wallin of KOffice here, with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreesh of OpenOffice.org here, and with Erwin Tenhumburg of StarOffice here.)

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 Released

7/02/2006

I'm a bit behind in reporting on current events, so this post is by way of a quick cut and paste to update the interview with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreech of OpenOffice.org that I posted on May 13 as part of the continuing series on the Evolving ODF Environment. Look for Part IV of that series on July 5, when I post the interview with German software developer SoftMaker on its own ODF-compliant office suite, called SoftMaker Office.

With that as an uncharacteristically brief prelude, here is the text of the email sent out on Thursday (June 29) by OpenOffice.org, announcing their new release of OOo, and describing its new features, fixes, upgrading information and other details:

All

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is now ready for download, three months since the release of 2.0.2. This latest release contains a mixture of new features, bug fixes, and security patches, and demonstrates the OpenOffice.org Community's determination to maintain its position as the world's leading open-source office productivity suite.

Pacheco Committee issues Highly Critical Report on Mass. ITD Adoption of ODF

6/30/2006

[Updated: 10:30 ET to add quotes from Globe article]

Those that do not closely follow Massachusetts politics closely (a dismal pastime at best) may remember that State Senator Marc Pacheco, the Chair of the Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee, held a public hearing last October 31. At that hearing, he called upon then State CIO Peter Quinn, and Linda Hamel, the General Counsel of the State's Information Technology Division (ITD) to testify. During and after their testimony, he was highly critical with respect to the adoption by the ITD of a new Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), and in particular of the requirement under the ETRM that the Executive Agencies use only ODF-compliant office productivity software after January 1, 2007. He also called a number of witnesses to address the Committee that were uniformly hostile to the new policy (rejecting the offers of supporters to testify), and announced that his committee would commence an investigation into the facts underlying his concerns.

Senator Pacheco's committee has now completed it's investigation of the situation, and has issued a 31 page, small type, single-spaced written report that is… (again) highly critical of the State's Information Technology Division (ITD) with respect to its adoption of a new Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), and in particular of the requirement under the ETRM that the Executive Agencies use only ODF-compliant office productivity software after January 1, 2007. On an initial scan, it is difficult to find a part of the report that is not consistent with the allegations and conclusions expressed at the hearing eight months before. The title also suggests both the tone and the conclusions of the effort: Open Standards, Closed Government.

The report was issued at a press conference held at the state house at 2:00 PM Thursday afternoon, and is not as yet available on line. Only a limited number of print copies were made available (to the press), but I was able to obtain an imaged copy by email late this evening. As of this moment in time, there is only one news article available on line, which can be found here (the article was written by Martin LaMonica, who is local and I expect attended the press conference). [The report has now been posted, and can be found at the Mass.gov site.

Who Should Govern the Internet (Act II)

6/28/2006

For some time I have been covering the topic of Internet Governance, both in the macro (and more meaningful) sense of ensuring that both the Internet and the Web fulfill the incredible promise that they hold for the advancement of all humanity everywhere, as well as in the micro, and more political sense of who should control the root directories of the Internet - a more symbolic than substantive question of control.

My most detailed coverage can be found in the November 2005 issue of the Consortium Standards Bulletin, titled WSIS and the Governance of the Internet, which I wrote in the run up to the second plenary meeting, and closing event of the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), an ambitious initiative launched by the United Nations and administered by the ITU to to bridge the digital divide between the haves and the have-nots.

That second meeting was held in Tunis, Tunisia, and was overshadowed by the ongoing political spat over who should control the root directories of the Internet - small databases that include the two letter national identifiers that end domain names and help direct Internet traffic to the appropriate geographical target. Currently, those domains are under the control of ICANN, which is in turn empowered to administer the directories under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with National Telecommuncations and Information Administration, a branch of of the United States Department of Commerce.

That subjection of a vital, if small, element of the Internet infrastructure to the control of a single nation achieved increasing significance as the Bush administration adopted an increasingly "go it alone" attitude in the post-9/11 world, and the political brouhaha that built up over the issue after the Department of Commerce announced in the summer before the Tunis summit that it would not, as earlier promised, relinquish control of the root directories built into a resounding crescendo that opershadowed, and indeed overpowered, any real progress that might otherwise have been accomplished at Tunis.

The upshot was that the opposition caved to the U.S. on the eve of the summit, taking away as a sop the formation of a new Working Group on Internet Governance, which is now in formation, leaving control of the root directories in U.S. hands.

Now, however, another time-sensitive event is looming: the expiration of the MOU itself, opening the door for debate over whether ICANN itself should remain the indirect custodian of the root domains (the domains are actually administered by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA), or whether the contract should be turned over to another contractor (if you'd like to know the full details of how things operate, see the Feature Article from the September CSB, titled WSIS, ICANN and the Future of the Internet).

More on Plugins (from Down Under)

6/25/2006

Last fall, I received an email from Adam Kennedy, someone I didn't know at the time, announcing that his company (Phase N, an Australian Perl development shop) was preparing a converter that would enable Microsoft Office users to convert their files into ODF format. He promised to let me know when a press release would be issued making that fact public, which he did. I wrote about that news on October 20 of last year in a blog entry called (Dead Heads take note) If the Thunder Don't Get Ya, then the Lightning Will: Open Source Victoria Opens Back Door to Office.

The press release announcing the development project of the converter (called "OpenOpenOffice" read in part as follows:

Open Source Victoria, Australia's government-funded open source industry cluster, has formed an alliance with Phase N to develop an open source solution to bring Open Document Format capabilities to Microsoft Office users.

Called OpenOpenOffice or O3, it will allow Microsoft Office users to read and write Open Document Format (ODF) files. ODF is the next-generation standard for storing and interchanging office documents such as word processor files, spreadsheets and slide-show presentations. ODF is supported by many of the office productivity suites on the market, including OpenOffice.org, Sun's StarOffice, Corel Office, Abiword, KOffice and others.

Adam and I exchanged a bit of email on and off thereafter, but I hadn't heard from him in awhile until yesterday, when I got an email letting me know that what had been more in the nature of an informal email to Tim Vavarcheck at the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) had somehow ended up being treated as a formal response to the ITD's RFI, and consequently had been listed at the ITD Website as such.

The Transitive Property of Dots: What Price Massachusetts?

6/23/2006

A week ago, I wrote an entry called ODF, MS and Mass: Now you see the dots (and now you don't). Today I'll look at some more dots, both clearly visible and obscure, and see how many I can identify and connect.

While a quarter-page ad on the editorial page of the Boston Globe costs far less than a $30 million in-kind software donation to Bay State schools and universities, it's a good bet that the ad titled "Working Together Better by Design" that appeared in yesterday's Globe has something to do with last week's generous contribution. Since the ad urges the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) to adopt Microsoft's Open XML format, then by the transitive property of mathematics (which, as you will recall from middle school, teaches that "if a = b, and b = c, then a = c"), there's a connection between that $30 million donation and the ODF policy of the ITD.

Certainly there's nothing subtle about the goal of yesterday's ad, which concludes:

The promise of interoperability is a vision we share with officials of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We look forward to the commonwealth's consideration of Open, XML-based format standards as one path toward bridging technical and organizational boundaries and advancing the capabilities of the state's information assets now and in the future. We are committed to working with all of our customers to realize the full potential of information easily exchanged.

The text of the rest of the ad tracks the currently displaying essay at www.Microsoft.com/issues. That essay incorporates many of the corporate talking points that I have noted before, and focuses on the high value of interoperability - and particularly of achieving interoperability "by design," from the beginning of the design cycle. It also notes the recent formation by Microsoft of an Interoperability Customer Executive Council, the importance that Open XML will play in achieving interoperability by design, and Microsoft's submission of Open XML to Ecma.

A Set of RFI Responses Worth the Attention of Sherlock Holmes

6/21/2006

My topic tonight is a set of RFI responses that surely must be an oxymoronic first: they make fascinating reading(fascinating? RFI responses?). Moreover, they offer the opportunity to go on something of an Easter egg hunt for anyone that wants to pick and prowl through them looking for this surprising bit of information or that, or who wants to weigh what is unsaid (and guess why) as much as to assess what has been claimed, and whether the respondent can actually deliver. Oh - and there's the occasional polemic thrown in as well.

What's all this about? Well, as I reported in early May, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) posted a "Request for Information" (RFI), soliciting information on plugins to convert documents created in ODF compliant formats into Office documents. The goal was to find the kind of conversion tools that could ease the ITD's transition of its more than 50,000 desktops from a primarily Microsoft Office-based environment to one that would rely only on ODF-compliant software. Absent such plugins, it would not only be necessary to convert all of those desktops simultaneously, which would be a much larger and more expensive endeavor than doing a more orderly phase-in, but the entire switch-over would need to await adequate accessibility features for the ODF suite chosen for deployment. But with such tools, normal desktop upgrades could be switched over to new desktops preloaded with ODF software, and training on all new programs could proceed in an orderly and efficient fashion.

Yesterday the ITD posted the, six from software vendors - and one from Microsoft.

The six plugin responses make for are an interesting read, and it would be very time consuming to thoroughly report on all of the interesting concepts, suggestions and hints that can be found in them, as well as to highlight the differing conclusions that each submitter offers (for example) on the degree and type of assistance that would be needed from Microsoft. If you're in to such things, you can have quite an Easter egg hunt browsing through what can be found here, how it is presented, and how various developers come out.

ODF, MS and MASS: Now you see the dots (and now you don’t)

6/17/2006

First, let’s put the Microsoft grant in context. There is nothing unique about such an action by Microsoft, and many of its competitors make similar donations (here are some examples of programs maintained by IBM and Sun). The generic reason …

The Spread of the Non-Assertion Covenant

6/15/2006

An hour or so ago Sun Microsystems made good on an earlier pledge to issue further "non-assertion covenants" (NACs) in support of open standards. In doing so, Sun has taken an important step in helping propagate and popularize a useful new tool to facilitate the implementation of open standards. The new NAC appears here, and relates to the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) V2.0 standard. Simultaneously, Sun is announcing a separate NAC relating to two other specifications co-developed with Microsoft: Web Single Sign-on Metadata Exchange Protocol and Web Single Sign-on Interoperability Profile.

These new NACs are modeled on the earlier commitment delivered by Sun to OASIS in connection with ODF. You can find a detailed analysis of what that NAC promised in this earlier blog post (Sun's Simon Phipps describes it here), which contrasted the Sun NAC to one issued shortly thereafter by Microsoft with respect to its XML Reference Schema (since submitted to Ecma, and now referred to as Open XML). The Microsoft NAC is further examined here.

The reason all of this matters is that an NAC has a number of distinct advantages over a traditional open standards commitment, and offers a way to streamline both the standards development, as well as the standards implementation, processes. Here's why.

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