Summary: ODF news from the past week, mostly positive this time around (no signs of sabotage from the Microsoft ecosystem)

APART from an ODF event and an OpenOffice.org event, not much has happened in this area of interest. Down under near Australia, Matthew Holloway emphasises that Microsoft does not properly support ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and he recommends the Sun ODF plugin for users of Microsoft Office. Up north in Canada, this new article was published to remind people that Microsoft Office can -- and probably should -- be substituted. OpenOffice.org is advocated as follows:

OpenOffice.org is currently on version 3.1, with an update expected this December to 3.2, which is expected to offer performance improvements and other technical tweaks, as well as a major update to the interface of Impress.

OOoCon, which is an annual OpenOffice.org conference, ended almost a week ago and attendants tell their stories in the following blog posts:

● ODF Plugfest & OOoCon 2009

Spent an intense last week in Orvieto, Italy. First two days had the 2nd odf plugfest; glad to see so many enthusiastic people from the odf universe again, or for the first time in person – and of course witnessing big corporation representatives like Doug and Rob sitting on the table, striving for better odf interop.

● Seven Days Time Machine

some of you might have been at the OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 or already read some of the (few) blog comments. I'd hoped to provide similar insights like I did in my blog comments covering the OOoCon last year (first posting). Time for changing that!

● Time Machine Reloaded - November 5th

let's go back the usual 7 days to re-experience the OOoCon 2009!

Rob Weir (of IBM) is keeping close to those products that are using the international standard (ODF), but Microsoft too is sneaking into rivals' events while pretending that OOXML and the corruptions associated with it do not exist.

Witness the effect of multiple specifications, one of which is just the incomplete corpus of a proprietary piece of buggy software (while the other is a vendor-neutral standard).

Rob Weir writes: "We now have 4 implementations of digital signature support per #ODF 1.2 draft. I hope some day we will see this in MS Office also."

Bart Hanssens keeps advancing ODF and jobs around ODF gradually crop up, which is evidence of the success of ODF.

Weir and others mentioned the release of ODFDOM 0.7.5 -- a valuable Sun product that we mentioned in [1, 2, 3]. Here is an official release announcement.

The milestone had already been uploaded last week at the OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto (Italy), but conference activities distracted me from announcing the release officially on the list.

Now you may find the ODFDOM packages of binaries and JavaDoc at ODFDOM's download section. Detailed release notes have been added to the Wiki.

Interestingly, a company called Microsystems (not Sun Microsystems) has just issued this press release which mentions ODF.

€· Multiple format support – includes MS Office, OpenDocument Format and PDF.

Yet more signs of the growth of ODF. OOXML is not even mentioned. ⬆