OpenOffice.org Down Under!

Well, it has not been long since writing my previous article (ODF Superceded by OOXML?) where it looked like OOXML was supposedly taking over as the new standard from ODF, things have changed. There were a number of news articles coming out hinting that Microsoft were changing their view and direction for ODF and would start supporting it more natively in the near future (early 2009).

Well, it seems it has now been confirmed with an official release from Microsoft about where they are planning on taking open standards in the future. The release can be seen at http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21ExpandedFormats... and offers some interesting points for ODF and how it may progress over time.

The articles states that Microsoft will start supporting ODF in a more native way directly in the new service pack 2 due for release in early 2009. This is a move forward from the previous plan to make available separate tools to do document conversion between the formats. Based on this proposal it seems that Microsoft Office will be offering a more complete implementation of ODF 1.1 than of their own OOXML standard. It will be an interesting race to see which becomes mainstream first in MS Office.

Another interesting point is that Microsoft has mentioned that they are looking at joining the OASIS standards group and having more direct involvement in how the standard is defined in upcoming versions and working together to make ODF a better standard. It all sounds very nice and is essentially the way open standards development works, but I will be interested to see how it works out within the ODF standard group and the interactions that take place.

Am I too skeptical? Well, history has taught me well! :)
Another point that makes me concerned is that the ODF standard has now released ODF 1.2 version for the OpenOffice.org 3.0 release. However, Microsoft are still talking about implementing ODF 1.1 in their new software? I hope this is just an oversight and they do implement the more updated ODF 1.2 format, but we can only wait and see how things progress over the next 6-12 months. I, like many others in the open community, are quite excited to see Microsoft offering better support for ODF, as it will only improved the standard and offer more diverse applications that can all use the same document format underneath.