Re: [office-comment] Public Comment

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

comment-form@oasis-open.org wrote:
> Comment from: russell@flora.ca
> 
> Marketing of OASIS format to office suite implementors

I'm not on the committee, but perhaps my comments will be useful.

> I am interested to see this format adopted by more office suites.

Currently KOffice is working to implement
the format (as well as OpenOffice.org). I believe it's been at least
discussed by Abiword (which has a similar format) and Gnumeric.

 > While I am personally a user of OpenOffice.org, interoperability and
 > choice is one of the advantages this format offers.
 > Is there documentation that could be used to convince IBM (Lotus SmartSuite),
 > Corel (Wordperfect suite) or other such vendors the advantages of the format?

Corel has been involved; I don't know what their commitment is.

I would also like to see Adobe (Framemaker) involved.

> I am also very interested in how to promote the format to large users
 > such as governments.  One of the limitations so far is the lack
 > of support in some of the major suites.
 > If it was "everyone but" then vendors who don't support
 > the standards could be excluded using existing acquisition policies,
 > but currently most of the suites don't support the standard.

Clearly market share is critical.  If implementations of a standard
are widely used, the standard will be adopted; otherwise they won't.
European governments have expressed an intense interest, see, e.g.,
http://europa.eu.int/ida/en/document/2592

If nothing else, it may be possible to support these formats through
various plug-in translators.  Not ideal, but a workable interim step.

I eagerly look forward to a time where office suite data is in
a publicly specified format that anyone can implement, without
restrictions.

--- David A. Wheeler