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Microsoft Vows to Open Office Document Format

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 December 2005, 03:02 CST

By Lai, Eric

Fight looms with rivals over desktop application standards

Microsoft Corp. last week said it will offer the XML document formats that are due to be used in the next version of Office as open standards, a move that's partly designed to appease government users who insist that their software be standards-compliant.

But it also is likely to escalate Microsoft's conflict with a group of vendors and users that is pushing the rival Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, as a global standard. And it's an open question as to whether Microsoft's planned submission of its Office Open XML formats to standards bodies will convince users that the software vendor is truly standardizing them.

David Chacon, a technical services manager at golf club maker Ping Inc. in Phoenix, said he will need some convincing. "I'm sure they're going to open up some portion of the [Open XML] spec, but it won't be truly usable without some sort of Microsoft hook or add- in," he said. "I'll believe it when I see it. And even when I see it, I'm not sure I'll trust it."

Microsoft appears to be trying to control the market instead of serving users, Chacon added. "I feel bad that they're doing [this] because of pressure as opposed to truly adopting it as a strategy," he said.

However, Peggi Douglass, IT director at Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA) in Montgomery, said the only reason she could imagine for switching the pension fund manager's 270 PCs from Office to rival software like OpenOffice in the near future would be if the state government mandated the use of OpenDocument.

OpenDocument "is a good idea, but it's going to cause a lot of short-term pain" for users who have to adopt products supporting that format, Douglass said. Although OpenOffice is free, the cost of retraining employees alone would ensure that using it wouldn't be cheaper than staying with Office, she said.

Even more important, Douglass added, is the fact that many of RSA's employees use custom-built or third-party applications designed specifically for Office.

Microsoft said it will submit the Open XML formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to Ecma International, a Geneva-based standards group. Ecma's evaluation process is expected to take about a year, and Microsoft said it will ask the group to submit the resulting standard to the International Standards Organization (ISO).

Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's information worker division, said the timing is designed to ensure that the Open XML formats are adopted as standards in time for next fall's expected launch of the next version of Office, code-named Office 12.

While Office is used on more than nine out of 10 PCs worldwide, government bodies such as the European Union argue that proprietary formats for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files could mean incompatibility in the future for archived documents.

In the most publicized move against Microsoft in the U.S. thus far, the state of Massachusetts in September finalized a proposed plan calling for its employees to save files in either OpenDocument or Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format instead of Open XML starting in 2007.

Yates acknowledged that Microsoft has run into "a few barriers" with government users over the standards issue. For example, he said, the company was asked to standardize its formats at a series of meetings with European officials.

Microsoft also intends to develop tools that will let older Office documents take advantage of the planned standard. "It's the end of closed documents," Yates said.

To create goodwill among software developers and corporate users, Microsoft will not only license Open XML for free but also is promising not to sue any company building software using the file formats. As the main developer of both Office and Open XML, though, Microsoft will maintain "an enormous first-mover advantage," said Andy Updegrove, a Boston-based attorney who represents standards groups.

Microsoft said eight companies and organizations have signed on to cosponsor its standard submission, including Apple Computer Inc., BP PLC and Intel Corp.

OpenDocument, which in September was submitted to the ISO by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is backed by vendors such as IBM, Novell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. The Boeing Co., General Motors Corp. and Visa International Inc. also were among the 84 companies that in April voted to make OpenDocument a standard.

Craig Steele, an IT consultant at San Jose-based Progent Corp., previously worked for a firm that partnered with Sun. Sun mandated that its own employees use StarOffice, its commercial version of OpenOffice. Steele, an Office user, said he was therefore forced to resave all of the files he needed to send to Sun workers.

"It made it a pain to work with them," he said. "[Sun] was trying to impose its standard on everyone else. But a standard is a standard because it's the majority."

Computerworld's Carol Sliwa, and IDG News Service's Elizabeth Montalbano and Simon Taylor contributed to this story.

I'll believe it when I see it. And even when I see it, I'm not sure I'll trust it.

DAVID CHACON, TECHNICAL SERVICES MANAGER, PING INC.

Copyright Computerworld Inc. Nov 28, 2005

Source: Computerworld

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