[odf-discuss] Microsoft and Novell cooperate on document formats

[Ian Lynch]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 00:47 -0800, marbux wrote:


> As I said in an earlier post, I suspect that you too have missed just
> how big a job it would be to fully implement MOOX in OOo. Someone (Rob
> Weir?) recently estimated that it would take over 10 years to fully
> implement MOOX in an app other than MS Office, if ever. 

Depends how much resource you throw at it. It seems unlikely that given
the progress with OOo from Star Office in a considerably shorter time
that coping with a file format would take significantly longer even if
it meant re-engineering most of the code. If you took just a WP (that's
an app) you could probably start from scratch and have a MOOX product in
less a lot less than 10 years with two or three full-time and able
developers.

Still, I can't really see much incentive to do this. I'm sure OOo,
Koffice etc will make filters to enable transfer of files too and from
MSO. Exactly which strategy they adopt will probably vary. Since MSO
2007 will import .doc, and OOo has .doc export that is pretty good there
is no real need to spend a lot of immediate support on providing MOOX
export. MOOX import will only become vital when a very significant
number of people start sending MOOX files as E-mail attachments and that
is going to take some time because of all the legacy MSO apps that won't
support MOOX natively.

Ian
-- 
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