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

[marbux]

Hi, Peter,

I don't have any information beyond what is in the article. But --

I agree Google Apps have some interop issues with the ODF
implementation. And if you think opening a Google document in OOo is
problematic, try it the other way around. It's far worse. And when you
look at the issue of using Google Docs in academia, particularly in
post-secondary education as in Arizona State University, then you have
to start wondering about how student dissertations and other documents
can comply with the style books without even a footnoting feature.

On the other hand, I suspect that Google Apps won't penetrate much of
the government market without fixing such warts. Interoperability of
ODF apps -- and conformance with the specification -- are unavoidably
going to become an issue in government software procurement. Likewise,
enterprises are not going to be satisfied with apps that get in the
way of interoperability.

So I see this problem as one that should be resolved without our
intervention. Market forces should take care of it over time. On the
other hand, I still think it makes a lot of sense to formally declare
subsets of ODF. For example, we might be able to convene a TC
subcommittee to deal with such issues and seek the participation of
Google and other light-weight editor developers in declaring a
light-weight editor subset of ODF for interoperability purposes. But
it would need the commitment of some of the developers of the more
featureful apps to add a compatibility mode for the subset so that,
e.g., OOWriter and KWord documents could be easily generated that
could be viewed and edited by the light-weight editors.

Thus far, most of the ODF interop work has focused on OOWriter <>
KWord and on OOWriter <> MS Word. Eventually we will have to address
the interop problems among the more and less featureful ODF apps.

Best regards,

Marbux



On 3/26/07, Peter Vandenabeele <peter at vandenabeele.com> wrote:
> 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
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