OASIS ODF InterOp/Demonstration

["Dee Schur" <dee.schur@oasis-open.org>]

Hi,
Hi all,

It appears now that it is sensible to move forward with exploring a future
"ODF Day(s)," right?
Here is the list of ideas and new potential participants that might be a fit
for such an event:

<from Dieter>
I would love to see technical presentations (e.g. reports from the 
>> Metadata SC, Formula SC, ...) as well as status presentations (e.g. 
>> ODF roadmap, ODF adoption, ...).
>> Furthermore we should have workshops on ODF interoperability in ODF 
>> enabled applications (OOo, KOffice, ...) and ODF processing (server 
>> and client side).
>> Taking the ODF Toolkit project into account, I hope that we can 
>> attract additional audience outside the classic OOo public.


<from Robert>
Would it be worth focusing on a single application time for this first
interoperability event?  Say, just word processors?  I think it would be
difficult to ensure that we have enough people with sufficient expertise in
all three applications from all vendors, and even if we could, any topic
would be interesting to only 1/3 of the engineers. 

So, if we focused on just ODF word processors, we could invite: 

1) OpenOffice on Linux, Mac and Windows (we would want to consider cross
platform fidelity issues even with a single application, and OO is a good
example for this) 
2) IBM 
3) KDE 
4) Google Docs 
5) AbiWord 
6) CleverAge (for the Word Plugin) or maybe Novell handles this? 
7) ZohoWriter? 
8) Anyone else? 

<from Dee>
HaanSoft, Corel and Red Hat (maybes)

<from Jean-Marie>

6) CleverAge (for the Word Plugin) or maybe Novell handles this?
> [...]

Up to now, the Novell ODF/OOXML translator is just an alternative packaging
of the Clever Age product.

Novell just added a Linux compliation, a Linux packaging (SuSE RPM), an
OpenOffice.org extension (xcu), allowing the user to run the tool either
from a Linux command line or as an OOo plugin. The core translation logic
(XSLT) is exactly the same. The whole Clever Age documentation (in .doc
format, yes !) has been used unchanged, including the developer's
documentation which describes the .Net implementation of the plugin. And all
that stuff in "copyright Clever Age".

<from Rob>
The point is that there is not a lot of interesting interop between a word
processor and a presentation graphics editor.  So we could have people
attending representing all application classes, but the interoperability
discussion will naturally break down into interop within like product
categories.  That is the 1st order work that needs to happen.   

My main concern is that if we tried to do all product categories we would
not get critical mass of attendance in some of them to accomplish much
interoperability work. 


<from Dieter>
Hi Rob,

I see your point but I would like to attract people from other areas too. I
would love to see more ODF implementations, not only word processors or even
Office applications.

Do we have enough other contacts via the adoption committee?

<from Erwin>

Rob,

I agree with your proposal to focus on word processors for the first round
of an interoperability workshop.

To the list of applications I'd add:

* Textmaker from Softmaker
* Thoughtslinger
* Mobile Office from Odendahl SEPT-Solutions

Have I missed anything? Can we identify a venue or do we host this event at
a member facility in Europe or multiple member facilities in varying cities?

The OASIS webinars have been enormously successful; would this be a way to
determine the need for such an event? 

**Finally, let me know if you want me to butt out ;) I am excited about this
work and I tend to get too enthusiastic sometimes....**

Best,
Dee