[odf-discuss] Should we mention "Microsoft Office + Sun plug-in" as an "ODF supporting" application ?

[Chris Puttick]

Fidelity as in the sense Microsoft uses it in regard to OOXML? I'd
agree. But then differing versions of Microsoft Office don't do much
better. Thinking more about content than presentation, then anyone who
is so bound into the Microsoft world as to experience problems in
version upgrades has built a fragile and hard to maintain information
system, IMNSHO. Their problems are of their own making and need to be
rebuilt in the long term or they will continually experience problems
in upgrade cycles.

In the less fragile world 90% is a reasonable estimate for
OpenOffice/Sun plugin performance. Actually OpenOffice seems higher
than that - possibly the plug-in is built against older versions of
the libraries.

I'd be very interested to see the Foundation plugin. Is it available
for testing?

Chris

On 12/09/2007, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 9/12/07, Peter Vandenabeele <peter at vandenabeele.com> wrote:
> > Actually by now, I consider the combination of Office 2003 and the
> > Sun plug-in to offer quite good (90% would be my number) support
> > of ODF in Microsoft Office 2003.
>
> You're a bit high on the fidelity. The Sun plug-in uses portions of the
> StarOffice/OOo code base to pre- and post-process conversions extrnally
> rather using Microsoft's internal native file format conversion routines as
> the Foundation's plug-in does, so the fidelity is no better than the
> conversions done by OOo itself. That gives about 80 per cent fidelity. I'd
> guess that you're placing it higher because your office doesn't regularly
> exercise the full Microsoft feature set.
>
> Sun didn't go much further in its reverse engineering of the Word native
> file format support API than what was published by Microsoft several years
> ago. That was enough to get ODF to show on the file open and save dialogs in
> Word, but not enough to achieve the high fidelity required for
> Microsoft-bound busines processes, at least those where data loss is
> unacceptable.
>
> Best regards,
>
>
> BUCK "MARBUX" MARTIN
>   Director of Legal Affairs
>   OpenDocument Foundation
>   Contact:
> <http://www.opendocumentfoundation.us/contact.htm >
> -- Universal Interop Now!
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>
>


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