IDABC's Berlin conference conclusions - positive developments
I was just looking at Karel De Vriendt's ODEF (Open Document Exchange Formats) Workshop Conclusions presentation. It's very interesing and rather encouraging as there's some much needed pragmatism being injected into the debate. I hope some of the ODF protagonists will listen to Mr De Vriendt's appeal to industry "not to involve [public administrations] in a 'war of the formats'" - I think that it is becoming clearer that this isn't a zero sum game.
I was pleased to see that Mr De Vriendt specifically noted that "public administrations can decide on what formats to use for exchanging documents between themselves". Given IDABC's remit I assume he's referring to pan-national exchanges - but this is exactly what I've been advocating across Europe from the very beginning of this debate. Let the national administrations decide on what best suits their purpose. Given that most pan-national interchange is at least semi-structured I expect that OpenXML's customer defined schema support will provide a compelling value in most of these cases.
What really caught my eye though were the following bullets, and I've commented why below each:-
•Make quality products supporting all relevant standards;
There's an ODF translator available for Word.
Sun is already working on OpenXML support for OpenOffice, and Novell has already delivered this using the Open Source tranlsator project.
Sun also has an ODF add-in for Office 2003 and I assume they'll make it available for Office 2007 too (it's about the format not product competition right?)
One assumes this applies to IBM as much as Microsoft, Sun or anyone else though - and perhaps this explains why IBM in particular is so desparate to see policy support for a single standard. Unlike Sun and Microsoft, IBM's trying to tell its customers what they should want rather than listening to what customers are saying themselves.
•Allow administrations to choose the format they want to use internally (default format);
Presumably there's no issue here. I guess people will point to this not being the case for the ODF translator - but it's an Open Source project, and Sun's tool does this, so presumably it's not an insurmountable issue.
•No incomplete implementations (able to open all documents conforming to the standard), no proprietary extensions;
Open Office uses proprietary extensions to ISO 26300 - for formulae for example. Sun of course know this. I suspected IBM did too, but I'm starting to wonder whether this has escaped IBM's attention. ISO 26300 isn't sufficiently defined to support practical inteoperability without the use of proprietary extensions.
IDABC must know this, whether the public administrations do though is another matter I suspect - perhaps that's what this is pointing towards?
•Standard compliance programmes, document validation.
I've blogged about ODF's Imperfect Interoperability before. There's not been enough discussion about this aspect of the debate and I'm hopeful that IDABC will be succesful in starting one.
So, overall encouraging developments in Europe. Andrea Di Maio's (Gartner Research VP - Government) presentation "The Battle for Open Formats: A Cynical View" is worth checking out too. Andrea's point is that the whole debate is irrelevant and misses the crucial issue!