Plan-B for Software Documentation

Sun Microsystems released a plug-in that allows MS Office to work with ODF (or ISO 26300) files. The plug-in supports text-documents, spreadsheets and presentations, corresponding to MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Powerpoint. The plug-in works with MS Office versions 2000, XP and 2003. It can be downloaded from Sun for free.

Why does it not support MS Office 2007? Malte Timmermann gives the answer and many more around the new ODF plug-in for MS Office.

While other states’ attempts to safeguard their documents by using open standards seem to have stalled for now, New York is the next one to try. Assembly woman RoAnn M. Destito (Democrat), proposes the state study how government documents are created, shared, and archived and how these documents can be used in a way that “encourages appropriate government control, access, choice, interoperability, and vendor neutrality,” in Bill A08961.

This means more consideration of open standards like ODF and ISO 26300, to avoid perfectly preserved digital garbage that can’t be read because the format is not documented and the sole keeper of the application creating it went out of business.

Computerworld writes abut the defeat of bills pro ODF in six states. The proposed legislation would have in one way or another mandated that state agencies in California, Florida, Texas,
Oregon, Connecticut, and Minnesota, need to use open standards for office documents. The only currently accepted open standard that is implemented by more than one vendor is ODF/ISO 26300.

However, lobbying by Microsoft kept legislators from demanding that electronic office documents are stored in non proprietary formats, so they can be accessed in many years to come. Interestingly, most legislative comments do not doubt that this is a worthy goal. However they do feel used by either side of the debate and their lobbying interests. So they squashed most bills without a vote. I guess the companies gathered in the ODF Alliance lost a battle, but they don’t declare the war over.

As an increasing number of companies and institutions migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org, interoperability becomes more and more important. The world is still geared towards Microsoft’s document formats and that poses barriers to migration, one of which is fonts and their influence on how documents print and break into pages.

The leading Linux distributions in the enterprise space, Red Hat and SuSE delivered some new fonts that are metrically identical to the widely used Microsoft fonts. What does this mean for you? You can receive an MS Office document and use the equivalent font and print it w/o fear of it breaking into a different number of pages. It also means you do not need to update the table of content because of re-pagination. Off course the same is true in the opposite direction ODF –> MS Office document.

Use Plan-B for OpenOffice.org to learn more about how to configure Writer for optimal MS document compatibility.

Henry Neufeld, offers on his blog an OpenOffice.org (OOo) template for publishing a 6×9 booklet. Henry writes Bible related texts and publishes them as booklets. He shares his publishing template in ODF format with the world.

Henry’s OOo Writer template contains Title pages, dedication, acknowledgments and table of content as well as a list of chapters. The preface has roman numerical page numbers and the chapters show a title page as well as content pages with page numbers. All pages are sized for a 6 x 9 inch format.

With a little editing of the publisher information and the ISBN reference you can use it to publish your own texts. What are you going to write about?

Free Software Magazine publishes a white paper comparing ODF and OOXML the two XML office document formats that compete to become the standards of choice. The author, Edward Macnaghten has produced the white paper on request from the UK Action Group of the Open Document Format Alliance. So don’t expect a totally unbiased work, but the white paper lists a lot of comparison facts and could be useful for any project making a decision for the future office document format.

The original paper, has fewer formatting constraints imposed by the magazines format.

The GullFoss Blog announces the availability of a first version of the ODF Toolkit for .NET.

The new library is called “An OpenDocument Library” (AODL) and written completely in C#. This library allows .NET project to support ODF documents.

It currently supports only a limited set of functions

• Creating new documents in the text and the spreadsheet format.
• Loading and manipulating documents in the text and spreadsheet (not complete yet) format.
• Export loaded or created documents into the HTML format (text and spreadsheet documents).
• Export loaded or created documents into the PDF Format. (this is in an early state of implementation and only available for text documents)

Californian Democrat Mark Leno introduced a bill that requires the Californian government be equipped to store and exchange documents in an open, XML-based format. This legislation would stipulate this requirement starting 2008.

Massachusetts was the first state that recognized how important it is to store and archive office documents in a format that can be guaranteed to be readable in 30 or 50 years from now. Software that reads proprietary document types can vanish with the company that produces it and the support from rivals to support this format will vanish shortly thereafter. This can leave you with a heap of bits, perfectly preserved on tape or other storage media which is not reproducible for the human eye. And after all that is the purpose of all document archiving. There response was to include a similar mandate in the id term IT plan, requiring storage and archiving of documents in ODF or PDF.

We will see how this proposed bill will work out and what it’s effects are. Currently only ODF, also known as ISO 26300, does fulfill the requirements as storage format. And OpenOffice.org is the most widely distributed program with comprehensive support for ODF. While there exist import filters MS Office they are currently limited to text documents (MS Word) and do not include spreadsheets or presentations.

Dutch firm O3Spaces B.V. of a program that lets OpenOffice and StarOffice users collaborate on office documents. O3Spaces is fully integrated in OpenOffice.org, so users do not need to leave OpenOffice to perform most functions. This is equivalent to MS SharePoint for MS Office.

O3Spaces is a cross platform collaboration server with integration in the desktop, OpenOffice.org and a browser interface. In this environment a team stores their documents, if ODF or MS Office format, on a central server and creates versions with every change saved. users can receive notifications if any document they have in their workspace changes.

With O3spaces users can share documents on different OS platforms, such as Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. In addition the server provides shared calendars for scheduling meetings. A workflow engine can route documents to different users for review or approval.

All documents are secured by access rights so only authorized users can access them. The user management can be integrated with any LDAP server.

The version for self installation, the professional edition, costs 295 Euros (~ $375) , for five-users. A 100-user license costs 5,900 Euros (~ $7,600). O3Spaces is also available as an on-demand version or hosted application service.

Switching to OpenOffice.org could save the Danish government $21 million over an upgrade to Office 2007. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by Ramboll Management an IT consultancy. The report was commissioned by the Danish Open Source Business Association.

The Danish Parliament decided on June 2 that starting 2008 all documents exchanged with its citizens must be based on open standard file formats. The report compares the two options of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007 with OpenXML and OpenOffice with the OpenDocument Format (also known as ISO 26300 standard).

The report looks at the cost over five years, including training and file conversion. The report concludes that on a strict cost basis, sticking with installed Offixe XP and Office 2003 and using a plug-in to load and save ODF documents would be the least expensive option. However, switching to OpenOffice, which uses ODF as its native file format, is little more costly. While upgrading to MS Office 2007 would cost additional $21 million.