Jean Goffinet of Clever Age has a post intriguingly titled ''Are we traitors or mercenaries?'' on the ODF Converter team blog describing a lunch appointment with two ''emissaries'' from OpenOffice.org and OASIS. He explains how after the project was announced he reached out to both organisations, as he says :- After the project launching, I ...

Gary Edwards of the OpenDocument Foundation stopped by the other dayto comment on my post ''Spinning out of control'' in which I commented that the ISO press release about ODF made claims which I didn't believe could be truthful. Specifically that Billions of existing office documents will be able to be converted to the [ODF] XML standard ...

Interesting development on the ODF formula front. IBM has donated the end-user 1-2-3 @function reference help file from IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.8 (under Section 5 of OASIS' IPR policy) to speed up the work. I used to work for Lotus. I remember when IBM stopped investing in SmartSuite because ''the desktop wasn't strategic'' many of ...

I’ve just been on the phone with a journalist. He disagreed when I said that a differentiator for OpenXML over ODF was the care being taken to ensure OpenXML will be able to faithfully represent the hundreds of millions, if not billions of existing documents saved in Microsoft Office’s binary formats. He pointed me to the OpenDocument press ...

I made a comment at an event in Brussels and quite a few people have asked for more information so I thought I'd post here. I mentioned that in my opinion, Sun were completely aware that ODF wasn't sufficiently defined to support spreadsheet interoperability as long ago as February 2005 and that the realpolitik inside OASIS was to take advantage ...

Oooh, how mysterious. I was listening to the Redmonk Podcast with Simon Phipps about yesterday's announcement of the ODF Translator project. Towards the end Simon is asked to talk about the ODF Foundation plug-in he saw demonstrated in Brussels on Tuesday. Simon explains that he was at a private event held under ''Chatham House Rules'' and ...

The tool adds an ODF option to the File Menu as shown ... I then pulled an ODT file from Massachusetts (they're not that easy to find). It downloads as .zip not .odt so I had to rename it and then opened it . This flashes up briefly ....   and then, by the magic of software ...

Chris Caposella (or ChrisCap as he is known inside Microsoft), has written an open letter giving Microsoft’s perspective on the future of document formats. I've chosen to highlight this section (my links and emphasis):- Supporting Multiple File Formats Today, Microsoft Office supports multiple document formats including standards-based HTML ...

I just spotted a great post on the TechEd Bloggers feed from Erika Ehrli - ''Open XML File Formats: What is it, and how can I get started?'' Erika points out some interesting resources for thise wanting to learn more about the Open XML File Formats: Introducing the Microsoft Office (2007) Open XML File Formats:  Learn the benefits ...

Here's June's update (see also May's and April's) from the Ecma International Technical Committee (TC45) which is working to establish an international open standard for Office Open XML File Formats (as described in the TC45 program of work) :- This week (June 19-21), the committee held its fourth face-to-face meeting in Sapporo, ...