Summary: Overview encompassing 3 weeks of ODF progress and victories

IT has been a long time since our last ODF update, so here is a long post catching up with key events and developments.

According to Peter Krantz, a seminar on ODF took place at Copenhagen Business School one week ago. Bart Hanssens and others noticed it and Hanssens has added this event to the ODF Web site at XML.org.

Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Date: 12 Jan 2010 - 09:30 - 15:00 Event Type: Conference

According to published reports in Norwegian and in English, Norwegian Broadcasting moves to OpenOffice.org and ODF. This is great news, but it's nowhere as big as the news from Munich, which was mostly covered in German (rarely in English). Coverage includes:

• Umstieg auf ODF in der Stadtverwaltung München komplett



• ODF es el formato de documentos oficial en Munich



• Münchner Verwaltung hat auf offenes Dokumentenformat umgestellt



• Munchen áttér ODF-re



• München Linux/Open Source projektje jobban fut mint valaha



• ODF es el formato de documentos oficial en Munich



• ODF es el formato de documentos oficial en Munich



• ODF es el formato de documentos oficial en Munich



• Munich se inunda de documentos ODF



• Munich trabaja oficialmente con ODF



• ODF es el formato de documentos oficial en Munich



• Munich completa la migración al formato ODF



• Munich completa la migración al formato ODF



• [Alemania] ODF es el formato de documentos oficial en Munich



• LiMux: München erreicht weiteren Meilenstein



• Umstieg auf ODF in der Stadtverwaltung München komplett

There is a lot more about this coming from individual people, with one person saying: "congrats to the #limux team for the complete switch to #odf #linux"

Wikipedia has been updated to reflect on this and the debate carries on. Over in Denmark, a decision on open standards was said to be on the eve of a final decision after the scandals. According to a rough translation from Denmark, Midtjylland is turning to ODF and possibly leaving Microsoft Office. They cite problems with interoperability between Microsoft's versions of Office. So typical.

Some people still wonder what software is good for ODF support and Sun releases ODF Plugin 3.1 for Microsoft Office, which includes support for ODF 1.2. Microsoft itself supports MSODF, which is not ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

There is also freeware and GPL-licensed software that adds ODF support to Microsoft Office.

Drupal's support of ODF was mentioned here before, but here it is again in some blog posts and in the ODF Web site, sitting there alongside another new page about OfficeReader (also see OffiViewer).

“Jesper Lund Stocholm and his friends from Microsoft are generally still trolling ODF, as usual.”Sander Marechal adds an anonymiser to Officeshots and the Microsoft provocateur Jesper Lund Stocholm trolls such a feature nonetheless.

Jesper Lund Stocholm and his friends from Microsoft are generally still trolling ODF, as usual. It seems as though Alex Brown and his buddies from Microsoft are bound to make another BSI fiasco. The Internet never forgets.

A Microsoft-sponsored ODF seminar (yes, from the company that attacks ODF) is to take place, according to Microsoft's ODF-hostile trolls. Unlike IBM for example, Microsoft still wishes to eliminate ODF. That's just its business objective.

Over in Brazil, there is a debate about ODF [OGG]. A rough translation of some coverage says that the "The director of the ODF Alliance Jomar Silva, @Homembit, was a guest at the table discussion on memory International Seminar of the Forum of Brazilian Digital Culture."

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Over in the UK, the OSA's Mark Antony is told that politicians can be believed "they're sincere when Whitehall is running on Ubuntu & documents on govt. websites are available in ODF..."

“Currently, Microsoft does not properly support ODF and it still treats it like a second-class citizen.”SJVN has his personal interpretation of the impact of the i4i decision [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. "Maybe in the aftermath of the i4i decision," he argues, everyone will "just have to bite the bullet & support ODF." Currently, Microsoft does not properly support ODF and it still treats it like a second-class citizen. Google too has some catching up to do, based on D. R. Evans, not to mention Apple, which has been helping Microsoft against ODF. As one person put it earlier this month, "ISO's current defect report for ISO 29500 (OOXML) has 809 pages. That are 71 pages more than the full specification of ODF 1.1! !" Miguel de Icaza helped Microsoft address some of these errors, but since then he has been crowned and named Microsoft MVP [1, 2]. He's like part of that company.

The UX OpenOffice.org blog marks the beginning of the new year and reports from the UX meeting in Hamburg [1, 2] while ZDNet Germany writes about KOffice 2.1.1 (there's more about Lotus Symphony). Bart Hanssens writes about ODF content at FOSDEM. He is preparing a talk and he has also uploaded a new draft of ODF 1.1 Interop Profile. His colleague Dennis Hamilton is happy about it.

Our reader The Mad Hatter is making valuable information future-proof right about now:

Open Formats – I’m Moving all Mom’s Poetry to Open Document Format

[...]

Of course if you do want access to Mom’s poetry, you can just go to OpenOffice.Org, and download Open Office at no cost. There’s no reason you can’t have both Microsoft Office and Open Office installed on the same computer.

In summary, even though there are no major ODF events, this international standard continues to develop and be adopted all around the world. ⬆