[odf-discuss] ODF Adoption -- Google Apps for 200, 000 secondary school students in Malaysia

[Peter Vandenabeele]

On 3/25/07, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> So Tiong turned to Google Apps Educational Edition, a free version
> giving them 2GB of storage per user and a pledge from Google to supply
> 200,000 email accounts, after they wrote to Google with a plea.

Two questions:

1) Is there a specific plan to standardize on any of the output formats
    that are offered by Google Docs (verbatim):

* HTML (zipped)
* RTF
* Word
* OpenOffice
* PDF

Next to adopting a certain application (be it as a local application or an
ASP/SAAS model) it is relevant to know in which formats the documents
will be exchanged. Or is the model to just exchange links to online
documents in which case, the format in which the Google Docs application
saves the documents seems to be irrelevant. But in the latter case, from
being "locked" into a document format, are we then not "locked" into a
specific supplier of SAAS ? Is there a guarantee that Google Docs (aka Google
Apps) will continue to support "OpenOffice" as an export format if 5 years from
now (that time period is mentioned in the text), all documents would need to
be exported to another system ?

2) did anyone manage to save a document from Google Docs to "OpenOffice"
    on a Windows XP system ? I can "Save As ..." a text document to all other
    4 formats on Windows XP and I can save to all 5 formats on Linux,
but saving
    to "OpenOffice" on Windows XP already for a few weeks, results in the Error
    Dialog (from which you cannot Copy-Paste grrrr ...):
    "C:\DOCUM~1\TEST_P~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\sip6afza.htm kan niet worden
     gelezen omdat het bronbestand niet kon worden gelezen.

     Probeer later opnieuw of ..."

     [free translation: "the file ... could not be read because the
source file could
      not be read. Please try again later ..."]

> Tiong estimates these accounts will last the organisation
> approximately five years.

So, what is the plan to avoid vendor lock-in after this 5 years ?
Which is one of
the economic reasons to use Open Standards (such as ODF).

Peter