Plan-B for Software Documentation

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.

Rick Jelliffe, from O’Reilley, writes today about “Comparing XML office document formats: using XML Metrics”.

He used a large document, the ODF 1.0 specification, (~735 pages) with tables and images and converted it into various formats for OpenDocument Format (ODF) using OpenOffice.org 2.0 and MS Office Open XML (MSOOXML) using MS Office 2007 beta. Then he used tools to measure the XML complexity with various metrics. This makes an interesting read for people who are interested in the debate of the two office document formats or are simply interested in the value of XML metrics.

Rick concludes:

The numbers seem to support the interpretation that beta MSOOX may be quite a bit less complex than ODF 1.1 at this stage, at least in the sense of using fixed structures more, and simpler in these sense of using fewer elements and attributes. ODF is flatter and has smaller filesize but seems to include more style headers than the MOOX does. The metrics indicate that the use of attributes may be significantly different between the two formats, for example for people looking at data conversion estimation. On the application level, Open Office loads the ODT file much faster than the Word 2007 beta loads the DOCX file.

A quick warning. Rick admittedly compares against a beta version of MS Office 2007. He states that “it seems possible that the Word 2007 beta saves a lot of information in bin64 encoded form that ODF exposes as attribute values.” and that this might be of temporary nature “while the thing [MS Office 2007 and the MSOOOXML] is under development.”

In any case a story I’ll follow up with.

Erwin Tenhumberg writes about “Alfresco’s ODF Virtual File System“. This is part of the Open Source Alfresco Content Management system.

This virtual file system offers a drive in Microsoft Windows that if you drop a file, it will add it to the content management system and also convert it automatically to ODF.

This is the power of open standards at work!

Techworld writes “The Spanish region of Extremadura has gone open source, deciding to move its entire administration to Linux and open source software within a year.”

The region of Extramandura decided in 2002 not to upgrade its school computers with the latest Microsoft version. Instead they moved to a Spanish Linux distribution based on Debian. This saved the poorest region of Spain a chunk of money (70,000 desktops with Linux and OpenOffice.org as productivity suite).

Now the administration has decided to do the same for their IT needs. They stress that the freedom represented by OpenOffice and OpenDocument Format (ODF) are vital to their decision. “Vázquez de Miguel said the move was expected to make Extremadura’s government less exposed to forced upgrades, and would make public documents easier to preserve and more easily accessible by the public.”

One can only conclude they were satisfied with the functionality and the total cost of ownership.

There is a new ODFReader for Firefox available. This Firefox extension does read ODF text documents and is being developed by the OpenDocument Fellowship. The ODFReader is a companion of the ODFViewer, using the same XSLT style sheet to convert XML into (X)HTML.

Currently the ODFReader for Firefox does support Firefox 1.5.0.X and claims to be Firefox 2.0 ready.

The OpenDocument Fellowship announced today the availability of an ODF Viewer.

This small application allows to view ODF documents even if no office suite supporting ODF is installed. For example, with this tool you can read ODF e-mail attachments or ODF documents download from the Internet without having installed OpenOffice.org or one of the other suites supporting ODF.

The application is currently in beta testing and does not yet support ODF 1.0 fully. I’d expect frequent updates. It is probably best recommended for power users or environments where it can be installed and updated by an IT department.

The ODF viewer is based on a XSLT style-sheet to transform XML to (X)HTML. The transformation infrastructure and the user interface are based on XUL and XULRunner.