Measuring Office Format Fidelity with Acrobat 9

When considering alternatives to Microsoft's Office productivity suite, one of the most important issues to evaluate is that of the success with which Office rivals such as OpenOffice.org can handle Microsoft's ubiquitous binary file formats.

While the phrase "small formatting inconsistencies" sums up the situation fairly accurately, organizations and individuals out to bring the open-source suite into their application mix could use a more rigorous means of measuring OpenOffice.org's handling of MS Office formats.

That's why, when Adobe briefed me on Acrobat 9, I was particularly interested in Acrobat's new "compare documents" feature, which analyzes two PDF documents and parses out all of the inconsistencies between them...

Microsoft OOXML: Dead Format Walking

When Microsoft, some time in the first half of 2009, makes good on its recent pledge to roll full support for the OpenDocument format into a second service pack for Office 2007, my reaction will be, "It's about time."

Since most Office users would be happy to continue using Microsoft's old binary formats, and since those for whom open standards are important would probably prefer ODF or PDF formats anyhow, I won't be surprised if OOXML quietly dies before the first OOXML-supporting iteration of Office ever sees the light of day...

Exchange Interop for the Rest of Us

Apple's announcement yesterday that it plans to add support for Microsoft's Exchange groupware server on iPhone and iPod Touch devices has gotten me thinking about Exchange support (or lack thereof) on other platforms, such as Linux and, strangely enough, Apple's own OS X. It's possible now to link up pretty much any mail client on any platform with Exchange via IMAP, but in order to access all the non-mail data that makes Exchange worthwhile, you need to find another route.

Google's Got Your Workgroup in Its Sites

Today, Google rolled a much-anticipated new component into its family of online applications: Google Sites.

The new service is the fruit of Google's 2006 purchase of hosted wiki provider JotSpot, and I've been looking forward for some time now to see what the search giant would do with its purchase, and to see how well it would integrate it with the rest of the Google Apps suite.

I've only spent a short time with Sites so far, but the service looks impressive.

OpenOffice on Ulteo in Pictures

Today my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is reporting on Mandriva founder Gael Duval's Ulteo, which now offers online access to the OpenOffice.org productivity suite:

OpenOffice.org goes online with SAAS version

I'm an OpenOffice.org user and overall fan of software as a service--particularly when it's a free service--so I thought I'd take Ulteo for a spin...

Bumps on the Road to Document Exchange Nirvana

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format.

Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced--but did not release publicly--about a year and a half ago.

At the heart of the rift between the Foundation and the rest of the ODF backers--led by Sun and IBM--lies a dispute over the proper strategy for achieving round-trip document fidelity between Microsoft Office and ODF-consuming applications, such as Sun's OpenOffice.org or IBM's Lotus Symphony.

When you open an MS Office document with one of these applications, a conversion engine attempts to map every formatting element it finds to a feature of the application doing the importing. If some formatting elements are unknown or otherwise unmappable, those elements are stripped and thrown away.

Stripped formatting elements mean formatting inconsistencies in documents passed between MS Office and other applications, and these inconsistencies have made it extremely tough to sell organizations on MS Office alternatives--even alternatives with zero licensing fees.

The OpenDocument Foundation wanted to see ODF applications pick up the capability to pass along unknown elements in order to maintain formatting fidelity, albeit at the cost, at times, of file format purity.

It turns out, however, that the backers of ODF care a great deal about file format purity--they're out to create a group of MS Office-killers, and as they see it, perpetuating bits of proprietary MS document formatting runs directly counter to their Office-slaying plans.

Microsoft Can Learn from Its Big Mac Sales

My Microsoft Watch colleague Joe Wilcox is reporting today on some rather eye-catching Apple/Microsoft numbers:

"Here's a big number: 20 percent of Microsoft Office's U.S retail sales are the Mac version, according to NPD. Here's another: Mac users account for 10 percent of retail Windows Vista Business and Ultimate sales."

If OS X, with its estimated 5 percent market share, can account for 20 percent of Office's retail sales, and if a significant share of Vista purchases are going to users who wish to run the OS simply as a virtualized application layer, it's worth asking how many dollars Microsoft is leaving on the table by limiting its cross-platform efforts.

Setting a New Standard

Does OOXML really "deserve" to join the ranks of 16,000-plus existing ISO standards? Probably not. But, to paraphrase a favorite movie quote of mine, I suspect that in matters like these, deserving sometimes has nothing to do with it. In this situation, I don't think it matters much, anyhow.

MS Office Student and Teacher and Pirate Edition

Over at Microsoft Watch, our own Joe Wilcox has penned an interesting post about how popular Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition has become in comparison to Microsoft's more costly business editions of Office. In particular, his last paragraph caught my eye: OneNote could greatly diminish the value for business users looking for activational copies of Office on the cheap. Businesses would more likely want Outlook. I'd argue the Outlook-for-OneNote swap is as much about discouraging piracy as offering something possibly more suited to consumers. Joe said it, not Microsoft, but I do wonder whether Microsoft actually considers the purchase of STE by non-qualified persons to be an act of piracy. Also, I don't know if activational is a word, but I'll allow it.  After all, ours is a living language......