[odf-adoption] ODF Adoption TC Call - October 17th 2006 - Minutes

[Alan Milnes <MILNEA@uk.ibm.com>]

Roll Call
=========

Charles Schulz,         Ars Aperta
Gary Edwards,           OpenDocument Foundation
Alan Clark,             Novell
Erwin Tenhumberg,       Sun Microsystems
Louis Suarez-Potts,     Individual (OpenOffice.org)
Donald Harbison,        IBM
Robert Weir,            IBM
Martha Mealy,           IBM
Alan Milnes,            IBM

Minutes
=======

Minutes of the meeting on 19th September were approved.

ODF Focus Area on XML.org
=========================

Don reminded members to try and drive content here.  All members of this TC
or the Technical TC are eligible for editorial rights, they need to
register on the site then send a note to Carol Geyer.

ODF White Paper
===============

Don and Luis would send their feedback via email. The related presentation
would have some speaker notes added.

Developer Topics
================

Rob spoke about the Developer toolkits and some of the issues round it,
Michael Brauer had recently blogged about the toolkit. There was a
discussion round issues with using the kit to work with different schemas.
Microsoft had raised the fact that ODF uses long tags which may hit
performance, but Rob believed that this was not an issue due to the fact
that the file is zipped. It was suggested that we should benchmark this, it
was agreed to place this on the agenda for the next meeting following an
off-line meeting with interested parties.

Round Table
===========

Erwin reported on a recent meeting he had in Brussels where sun presented
on ODF and Microsoft on Office XML. Microsoft had stated that in their
format developers could choose a level of conformance for their file. Rob
stated that he had not heard this but knew that Microsoft were struggling
with providing backward compatibility for new features, e.g. if Office 2010
has blinking text how do you tell Office 2007 what to represent this as?
Microsoft had made a point of how much larger their specification was,
however this is due to them not referencing any external standards. They
also highlighted Office's integration into business processes, including
custom schema data and their support for PDF/A. Microsoft also demonstrated
the ODF plug-in. The question was raised about what Microsoft means by
interoperability and how we can expose the difficulties, for example in
opening a complex Office 95 in current versions of Office.

The meeting was adjourned at this stage.

Regards,

Alan Milnes
IT Architect
Outsourcing Infrastructure Solutions
Service Delivery Operations
IT Delivery Operations (UK, Ireland and South Africa)
IBM Global Technology Services, EMEA

Tel: (+44) [0] 7764-660 709 (Mobex: 272952)
Internet: milnea@uk.ibm.com