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EU Stumbles On Buying Microsoft Alternatives -- Micosoft -- InformationWeek

This is too funny. While Neelie Kroes is banging the open source - open standards drum, the head of the EU Commissions IT dept is buying Microsoft!

The money quote: "Ellinides said in an interview arranged by a spokeswoman for Commissioner Siim Callas, who oversees procurement, that studies showed the costs of moving to open source outweighed the benefits. He said it may be time for a new study.

Tags: microsoft, eu, openstandards, opensource, kroes on 2008-06-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

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- A 300 page report summarizes the year long ODF Pilot Study conducted by the State of Massachusetts with this same conclussion. The cost of "rip out and replace" is both costly and disruptive. Even when th ereplacement is the open source and free "OpenOffice.org". The key to the study was the many workgroups and workflows based on MSOffice bound business processes. A workgroup document encapsulates these business processes through scripts, macros, OLE, data and media bindings, and security settings. Unless and until OpenOffice desktops can fully participate at this higher level of workgroup oriented workflows, there is no way to successfully implement ODF.
  
  Many mistakenly think that Microsoft adopting ODF as a native MSOffice format will solve the problem. While it's technically possible to capture workflow automation and processing in ODF (the Foundation proved this), that doesn't solve the problem for OpenOffice! Any MSOffice desktop running the da Vinci plug-in could participate in an existing MSOffice busines sprocess. But there was no way to pass these ODF docuemnts to OpenOffice desktops so that they too could be full participants. The MSOffice ODF docuemnts remained unique to MSOffice desktops because of the business processes; not the format.
  posted by garyedwards on 2008-06-17
"For the moment we are working in a Microsoft environment,"
said Christos Ellinides, director of corporate IT solutions and
services, who recommends software for the Commission.
Ellinides said in an interview arranged by a spokeswoman for
Commissioner Siim Callas, who oversees procurement, that studies
showed the costs of moving to open source outweighed the
benefits. He said it may be time for a new study.

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IDABC - EU: Microsoft's ODF-support draws mixed reactions

This is nonsense. Whether an organizations standardizes on ODF or OOXML, the "interoperability" they seek will still be based on every desktop running the same application. Neither format enables the interchange of documents between different applications - even if those applications properly implement the format standard. Anyone can prove this for themselves. Simply shuttle a few OpenOffice ODF documents between Symphony, Novell Office and Google Docs. Then weep. At least with MSOffice-OOXMLyou can exchange documents between different versions of MSOffice. Even though OpenOffice, Symphony and Novell Office are based on the same code base, interop might as well be zero.

Besides; what end users really want from a modern desktop office suite is collaborative editing of web ready documents. This discussion is so last century - 1995!

Tags: odf, ooxml, EU, ISO, harmonization on 2008-06-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

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EU's Kroes says further technology antitrust abuse cases pending UPDATE - Forbes.com

I wonder if the EU is aware that there is no such thing as ODF Interoperability? After more than five years of working side by side with Sun on the OASIS ODF TC, there is zero interop between KOffice ODF and OpenOffice ODF! How is it that Microsoft's joining the ODF TC somehow results in a level of application interop that has eluded and defied the efforts of two supposedly open source applications?

The truth is that OpenOffice-ODF and MSOffice-OOXMl are both based on an XML encoding of the application specific binary dump. The content layers are easily exchanged with other applications, but presentation continues to defy any kind of interop. Especially what the EU expects. Check out the quotes:

" The commission said that as part of its antitrust investigation into interoperability with Microsoft Office it will investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.

"Kroes said on Tuesday that the commission keeps a close eye on interoperability and said the market should have the right balance of non-propriety and propriety standards.

'Standards are the foundation of interoperability'. 'Standards may, of course, be proprietary or non-proprietary. Much excellent technical development has been driven by non-proprietary standards - the internet is awash with acronyms for non-proprietary standards: HTTP, HTML and XML'.

Tags: odf, ooxml, kroes, eu, antitrust, interop on 2008-06-12 -All Annotations (0) -About