Peter Vandenabeele

My presentation at ODF Camp in Barcelona was just put online (ODF Camp was run in parallel with OO.o conference 2007). It discusses the current status in Belgium regarding the ODF directive, where we see good progress in the interoperability between different applications processing ODF. At Fedict, I mainly focussed on Microsoft Office 2003 with ODF plug-ins, because the Belgian directive clearly states that there should be a good interop between ODF and the Microsoft Office suite, as a pre-condition for the directive to go into effect. I believe we have achieved that condition with the current status of the Sun plug-in version 1.1. Before installing the plug-in, see some details [*] below. The odf-converter plug-in is still under evaluation.

The rest of the ODF Camp, we had a unique chance to test interoperability of ODF with representatives of Sun (StarOffice/OpenOffice.org), IBM (Symphony), Google (Google Docs), Koffice, SEPT-solution (Mobile Office) and myself (present with Microsoft Office and the 2 plug-ins). I believe it is quite unique in the "Office" space to see this open "plugfests" where a significant number of serious companies and open source projects gather around a common ISO standard for Office documents. The ODF interoperability will be further discussed in the "ODF Adoption" Technical Committee of OASIS.

The conclusions of my presentation are clear. I believe ODF has good chances at becoming the prefered "universal format" for exchange of editable office documents. I hope that all players in the "Office" space will offer fully integrated support for the ODF format as the current ISO ratified open standard for office documents. For newly created documents, this will open the market for true competition between all players (proprietary and open source players) and resolve the problems of interoperability and document longevity that have plagued us in the past.

One important element to quickly achieve interoperability between all players is to define a "core profile" that is a full subset of the ODF format, but that leaves out some of the features that are hard to implement in currently dominant applications, such as e.g. MS Office. Those customers that prefer to reach interoperability on short term rather than maximum feature set, can then choose to restrict their ODF documents to the "core subset" and be guaranteed that this document is processed fully and exactly by all ODF processing applications that support the "core subset". This list of applications could include at least OpenOffice.org, MS Office with a plug-in and probably others.

[* Before installing the Sun plug-in version 1.1, read the README :-) I bounced into an installation problem on Excell, but that turned out to be a known issue with the way Excell handles upgrades to add-ins. Also, note that Outlook etc. are best closed during install (because Outlook depends on Word in some cases ...)]

update: I just found this short report of the ODF Camp on the xml.org site.