Open XML Support By IBM

jasonmatusow — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:25:00 GMT

Having been out all last week, I seem to have missed the opportunity to communicate about the fact that IBM is supporting Open XML in IBM Lotus Quickr, IBM Websphere Portal, IBM DB2 Content Manager v8.4, and IBM DB2 9 pureXML. Computerworld commented on this as well.

If National Bodies are trying to determine the marketplace viability of the Open XML document format - and the ability for other companies to implement it - this would seem to be a good sign that Open XML is in scope for international standardization.

This is to say nothing of the fact that ALL of the comments have been addressed in the dispositions work and is now available for review by the NBs. Following the Sept. 2 vote, the Project Editor along with support from Ecma TC45 committed to address all comments - not just those submitted along with "no" votes. 3,522 comments were addressed in the dispositions. It does not mean that each NB must review all 3,522. They need to review their own comments, and the dispositions for those comments. For all countries, this is a much shorter list. Even within those lists, the NBs then need to think about which of their comments are most critical to them.

Multiple Formats Discussion Continued...

jasonmatusow — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:21:00 GMT

I just have itchy fingers tonight, and can't help but blog a bit more. Peter Galli over at eWeek posted a piece in which I was quoted along with extensive input from Gary Edwards (late of the OpenDocument Foundation).

In the piece, Mr. Edwards talks at length about all the work he is doing to win business away from Microsoft. (That was the part I didn't like as much.) But, there were some fascinating other parts to what he said. (I think the incredibly good parts of the article were my quotes.<grin>)

First, he noted that ODF and Open XML could be converted to CDF. That couldn't be a better endorsement to one of my oft-returned-to themes...translation. The whole point of greater openness in document formats is that it is easier to translate between them.

Second, Galli reported on what Mr. Edwards hear in a discussion with IBM abouttheir Lotus Symphony product.

During that discussion, Heintzman outlined IBM's strategy of Web-centric cloud computing, where Lotus Symphony desktop documents are converted on the fly to an appropriate CDF profile, and then zoomed into the IBM cloud of Web platform applications and services, he said.
What Edwards and his colleagues took away from that discussion was the importance of the W3C CDF technologies to the IBM Cloud—Lotus Symphony desktop strategy as, once ODF desktop documents were converted to a CDF profile, many of the current ODF interoperability problems disappeared at that higher level

Once again, it is not about the document formats - it is about the applications and the business models behind them. IBM is SOOOOOO attached to ODF as the one-and-only document format, that they are going to translate it into <gasp> another format so that it can fit into "the IBM cloud" - in other words, into the rest of their business model.

At the end of the article, IBM is quick to try to distance themselves from Edwards and what is said in the article. It could be, because the points made in the article would seem to completely contradict the arguments they are making in favor of ODF.

I promise, my next few blogs will be about something other than IBM. I'm falling into a myopic pattern.

Matusow's Blog : IBM

Open XML Support By IBM

Multiple Formats Discussion Continued...