The Future of Documents

After the ODF-OOXML was, here comes another potential Format War – this time for e-Books: “Format War Clouds E-Book Horizon“, titles the Wall Street Journal.

Most major e-book stores have used  proprietary formats, but Sony’s recent move towards ePub might change the game. Although its devices (and others, e.g. the iLiad)  have supported the format for a long time, Sony Store e-books were offered in their proprietary format until now.

However, Sony will still be using DRM – using Adobe’s Content 4 proprietary solution. Which might run against Amazon’s own standard, if it gains traction. So much for a real open “standard”.

Kindle Review has its own interesting view about this article – stating that this format war might be a bit “overhyped”. They cite a survey where format concerns were only a very secondary issue.  format extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

However, I feel their viewpoint might be a bit Kindle-centric this time (maybe because Kindle is not in Europe yet!).   Portability and interchange, as we’ve learnt the hard way for Office Documents, are very important – and need to be established as soon as possible. In fact, their own poll indicates their reader tend to agree – 35% of respondents believe an open format is extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

 The broader question (or problem) might be DRM for e-books – a standard format is worthless if DRM blocks it. Why not abandon them altogether, like the music industry did?

A year or so after the dispute between ODF and OOXML seemed to be settled, the situation is getting more and more confused.

OOXML was fast-tracked as an ISO standard in April 2008 through a questionable procedure, but a few months later Microsoft admitted that “ODF had clearly won” the Document Format Standard war, almost a year ago. However, Microsoft increased its participation in ODF Standards bodies participation, to the point that some open source advocates feared they might take control over the ODF Standards.

After a number of other episodes, the strategy delivers - Microsoft’s OOXML standard implementation is back on the list of recommended formats for government organizations, including France’s RGI (Référentiel général d’interopérabilité). Open Source advocates argue that a second Document Format is useless since ODF has been around for a few years now, and that even Microsoft products do not support the OOXML ISO implementation yet (support for the ISO version of OOXML Microsoft Office in Microsoft Office version is slated for next year). Microsoft counters that OOXML is not their software anymore, since anyone can implement OOXML compliance (after reading the 6000 pages spec of course).

And us, document users, are sitting in the middle, worried that we might not have a single, universal open document format after all, which was the whole point in that ODF-OOXML decision…

I thought ODF was the winner of the battle for XML office document format representation? Maybe not just yet…

Microsoft launched the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) a while back. DII is a working group between Microsoft, Novell and a few others, which aims at increasing the interoperability between OOXML and OpenDocument Format.

Microsoft announced last Wednesday a few results of this initiative. This included a Firefox plug-in for viewing OOXML documents within the popular browser (including on Linux),  a new version of its “translator” software which allows more faithful conversions into ODF 1.1, and POI, a new Java SDK developed by the Apache Software Foundation to manipulate OOXML documents.

Interesting news when OOXML was considered as somewhat moribund, which caught a few of the OpenOffice advocates off-guard. These announcements compensate a few of the gaps Office and OOXML had against OpenOffice and ODF – one of them was that OpenOffice 3.0 was the only solution to simply view “competing” format documents without expensive licenses (Office 2007).

A number of OASIS members have formed a new committee, called OIC, to help implementors create applications that conform to the OOXML specification.

Technology companies such as IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Google, Novell, Red Hat, but also large governmental organizations such US Department of Defense, Belgian Fedict, South Africa Dept of Science and Technology, and others have joined forces to collaborate to deliver “true data interoperability for office applications”.

The group will analyze current interoperability, and specify “profiles” which will be aimed at vertical domains (e.g. archiving – maybe that will lead towards semantic representations, such as HR-XML version of ODF?), but also horizontal domains (e.g. browser-based editors).

Definitely good news for the Future of Documents as it will ensure future interoperability of the various ODF implementations (which is now the format of choice for office documents). Could that move be IBM and Sun’s response to Microsoft’s increasing control over ODF?

One of the significant news for the Future of Documents last week was of course the launch of Open Office 3.0 which was very successful – if not too successful !

It’s free, works on all major platforms – Linux, Solaris, Mac, and of course Windows. Many improvements, including better image, table, and note management,  an improved User Interface, makes it well worth trying. It can read its main competitor’s (Microsoft 2007) file formats. It can also output documents into Office 2003 files – although you probably want to stick to using ODF, which is the future XML standard for documents, and should ensure long-term portability and preservation of your native electronic documents.

But what’s even more interesting is that it can also be made available through your browser – Ulteo, a new Open Source project that delivers software applications to web browsers, gives full access to OpenOffice 3.0 in a browser, and adds its virtual desktop  and on-and offline syncing capabilities!

Definitely worth the test – provided your corporate firewall is not blocking access…

Thought we were all set, with Open Document Format (ODF) being the standard for Future of Office Document formats? The war might not be over just yet.The OOXML fast-track through ECMA is still having some ripple effects.

 A few days ago, IBM announced that it would reconsider its membership in the hundreds of open bodies that create global standards - namely ISO. This is a direct consequence of Microsoft’s Open XML standardization, which IBM judged unethical. IBM claims that OOXML was only accepted because it was fast-tracked, and  through political pressure.

“Common, open and consensus-based technology standards from reputable standards bodies help ensure that each of us can easily purchase and interchangeably use computing technology from multiple vendors,” said Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of open source and standards. “The ways in which they are created and adopted provide reasonable assurances that disparate products will work with one another, and withstand the test of time.”

In the last few weeks, a number of flags have been raised as to whether the ODF standard (which Microsoft admitted had won against OOXML) could actually be taken over by Microsoft. Indeed, it seems that over half of the active participants of SC 34 are actually directly employed or strongly related to Microsoft.

I am still hoping this could be good news for the Future of Documents by getting ODF convergence and ’synchronized maintenance’ with OOXML. But I have to admit I have to agree with the many that see this as a risk of ODF being mostly controlled by Microsoft and taken into directions that might not be in line with its original spirit…