Sun to offer ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office
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InfoWorld - Sun&#160;has created software that will provide translation between the file format in Microsoft&#39;s Office 2003 suite and ODF (Open Document Format for XML). The plug-in lets people who use computers with assistive technologies to access documents written in ODF.
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UPDATED - In another carefully timed move to garner support for its document format still under consideration for an international standard, Microsoft today clarified the terms under which use of its Office Open XML format by developers is permitted.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ has been quietly adding to the cache of reference applications it hopes will help transform Microsoft Office 2007 from a mere productivity suite to a collaboration tool. Aiming to help users access data from various enterprise sources through the most common Office tools, Microsoft hasÂ created add-ons to Office 2007Â that it calls Office Business Applications, or OBAs. They add business processes and intelligence to applications such as Excel and Outlook. Last week, the company quietly unveiled an OBA reference application designed for the health-care industry, and the company is gearing up to make OBAs a core focus at its Worldwide Partner Conference, which will be held next week in Denver. Microsoft hopes partners and customers will enhance the existing Office applications to take advantage of data and processes stored on the back end -- in places such as SQL Server and CRM and ERP applications, said Daz Wilkin, a program manager for Microsoft's platform strategy group, in an interview in New York this week. Microsoft built Office 2007 and created tie-ins to Microsoft server software such as SQL Server specifically with this in mind. To help companies build OBAs, Microsoft has been releasing reference applications that provide technical documentation and information on how to build the new functionality using Office 2007. The reference application released last week, Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture for Health Plans, details how health care providers and employers can work together to connect employees with personal trainers using Microsoft Office and Microsoft server software. The key to the application is how easily it can automate schedules using Office applications such as Outlook, Wilkin said. Improved communication lets a personal trainer handle more clients than he or she normally could, Wilkin said. Microsoft is encouraging partners to build OBAs as well, since they have already been building custom functionality to help business users access data stores through front-end applications such as the ones in Office, Wilkin said. "People have been able to do this in the past, but now it's a lot better and easier," he said. Still, Microsoft's current explanation of OBAs is confusing to some of its business partners. "I don't think it's been articulated clearly what OBAs are yet," said one source whose company works with Microsoft and who asked not to be named. He suggested that OBAs and the links between Office 2007 and back-end applications such as SQL Server and Dynamics CRM are Microsoft's way of making Office more of a platform on which companies can build other applications. That could differentiate it from competitive Office suites such as OpenOffice.org, he said. Other companies that have been working with Microsoft on OBAs seem to have a better idea of how Microsoft hopes they will work. Construction management company Skanska USA Building Inc. has built an OBA on top of the forthcoming Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 business-intelligence package. Skanska has been a pilot user of PerformancePoint for more than a year. Microsoft on Tuesday released a Community Technology Preview of PerformancePoint, which combines existing and new products such as Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager and business intelligence products the company acquired from ProClarity. The final version of the product is slated to be available by the end of September. Allen Emerick, director of information for applications and integration at Skanska, said his company is using an OBA it built that combines Office Excel and PerformancePoint to budget and forecast construction projects. Previously, the company used Excel on the front end but had to build an XML (Extensible Markup Language) integration layer between Excel and various Microsoft-based data stores in the back end to achieve the same effect. "Before, we had to do a lot of work to access the data," he said. More information about OBAs can be found on the MSN portal dedicated to the technology.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite. The move sounds ambitious, but Microsoft is unlikely to be trembling in fear just yet --Â Lotus Symphony,Â as it will be known, is really just a re-packaging of the OpenOffice suite that has taken only fringe market share from Microsoft, since being taken under the wing of Sun seven years ago. IBM says it will contribute 35 programmers to the Symphony-cum-OpenOffice development effort, in a bid to spark new interest in a software suite that can trace its ancestry back to a suite called StarOffice, once owned by obscure German company, Star. IBM hopes its much larger corporate presence will generate more success this time. "IBM is very pleased to beÂ joining the OpenOffice.org community.Â We are very optimistic that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world," said Mike Rhodin, of IBM's Lotus Division. "We welcome IBM's contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO ODF standard," said John McCreesh of OpenOffice. IBM has been here before. In 1995, it paid $3.5 billion for Lotus Development, complete with its suite of high-regarded office applications, only for those programs to fall of the map completely as it focused on selling the OS/2 groupware, Lotus Notes, in a nice twist itself once a creation of current Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. OpenOfficeÂ has launched version 2.3 just of its suite bang on cue for IBM's endorsement. TechworldÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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InfoWorld - It may be Valentine&#39;s Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM.
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(InfoWorld) - SunÂ has created software that will provide translation between the file format in Microsoft's Office 2003 suite and ODF (Open Document Format for XML). The plug-in lets people who use computers with assistive technologies to access documents written in ODF. A preview of the software, called StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology, is expected to be available in mid-February with a final release on Sun's Web site by the middle of June. The software enables two-way conversion between Microsoft Office 2003 and ODF, a standard format approved by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) for office documents. Certain applications and devices that use assistive technologies -- such as screen readers for the blind and technologies that allow people who are quadriplegic to operate a keyboard -- come with drivers that are compatible with Microsoft Word 2003 or earlier, said Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun. Vendors developing the assistive technologies have reverse-engineered Office 2003 interfaces to create the applications and devices, he said. "Right now, our focus is to ensure that people using assistive devices are able to join in with OpenDocument workflows," Phipps said. "Because Microsoft hasn't published interfaces for those devices to use, they are all hard-wired to Office 2003, and their users can't migrate to other software." Currently the state of Massachusetts, which is in the midst of a project migrating all office documents to ODF, is using the converter. Sun said it eventually plans to offer the converter for versions of Office that are earlier than 2003, and possibly for Office 2007, the newest version that was released last month. To create the converter, Sun built a library from OpenOffice.org that provides the same file conversions that are found in the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice productivity suites, Phipps said. Sun then added ODF support as a file format to all the places in Word using that library. Sun is not the only company that offers software to do ODF translation. IBM, which, along with Sun, is one of the most fervent supporters of ODF, has developed APIsÂ that specifically enable assistive technologies to talk to ODF-based applications. Through Project Missouri, IBM developed an API called iAccessible2 that make it easy for visuals in ODF-based applications to be interpreted by screen readers that reproduce that information verbally. Microsoft, which does not support ODF natively in Office, has funded the development of software that offers two-way conversion between the default format in Office 2007, Open XML, and ODF. The software, called the ODF Translator, was made available in 1.0 form last week on SourceForge.net. However, Microsoft did not include native support for ODF in its Office 2007 software, though it supports 30 other file formats in that suite. Microsoft hopes Open XML will follow the same path of ODF and be approved as an ISO standard; the file format is currently under consideration by the organization. However, Open XML is having trouble getting through the ISO approval process because certain countries are unhappy with the specification the way Microsoft submitted it, according to sources familiar with the process. Â
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The free download enables Office 2007 users to save documents as Adobe PDF or Microsoft XPS formats.
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It's easier than you might think to create your own OpenOffice.org extensions.
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InfoWorld - After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft&#39;s Office software.
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Microsoft Corp. said on Sunday that it would share the underlying software code for its Office program as part of its efforts to make governments more confident in the security and compatibility of the world's largest software maker's products.
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Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.The support, which starts at $20 per user per year, will be offered to companies that distribute OpenOffice.org, not directly to end-users, according to Mark Herring, senior director of marketing for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Network.com. &quot;For a lot of distributors, they wanted to distribute OpenOffice.org and had no option for back-line support,&quot; he said.OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Sun&#39;s accompanying commercial product, are compatible with Microsoft Office and identical in terms of capabilities, which include word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. But until now, Sun only supported StarOffice.Another difference will remain -- Sun does not plan to provide indemnification against lawsuits for OpenOffice.org, as it does for StarOffice, Herring said.Sun&#39;s move comes as OpenOffice.org is being downloaded 1 million times per week with total downloads to date standing at about 110 million, Herring said.Out of that number, Sun estimates that &quot;tens of millions&quot; of people are actively using the software, according to Herring. The most recent version is 2.3. Version 2.4 is expected in March and will contain significant new features, according to the openoffice.org Web site.&quot;Microsoft Office is still the dominant tool out there -- only a fool would deny that,&quot; he said. &quot;But [OpenOffice.org] has had a huge amount of momentum.&quot;Sun believes the average OpenOffice.org user skews younger on average and that download activity in Europe and the U.S. has been greater than in Asian countries, he added.Developers can create extensions to the core OpenOffice.org suite. Sun has made a new one for shaving down the size of presentation files, Herring said. The wizard-like tool goes through a file and asks users whether they want to keep or compress the various elements, he said.Sun plans to provide support for any extensions it creates, according to Herring. As for ones made by third parties, &quot;we would have to work with them on that code on a case-by-case basis,&quot; he said.Sun is also releasing StarOffice 8 Server. Herring described it as a conversion engine that changes 40 document types into PDF files. The server, which costs $11,000, is aimed at enterprises with large stores of legacy documents that aren&#39;t archived with an open standard, according to Herring.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O is planning to release a new version of its Office program for small businesses that handles accounting and customer management tasks, the world&#39;s largest software maker said on Friday.
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Thanks to some new developments in document standards, Office 2007 users will be able to share files with open-source office apps and online productivity suites from the likes of Zoho and Google. In Monkey Bites.
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OpenDocument took another step away from obscurity Tuesday, as Apple confirmed that Mac OS X version 10.5 -- known as "Leopard" -- will natively support ODF files, alongside Microsoft's Word 2007 formats. Apple had previously added support for the format in its Pages word processing application.
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If you&#39;re up for some light reading, see the links below for the underlying documents that formed Microsoft&#39;s April settlement with Sun Microsystems.
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Responding to requests, Microsoft will sponsor open-source project to build translators between older office formats and Open XML.
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Maker of the WordPerfect word processor and productivity suite will support Microsoft's Office Open XML, OpenDocument format.