On 7/20/07, Jean Hollis Weber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

This has been one of those good ideas that surfaces every six months or so
and then doesn't get anywhere because everyone's too busy doing other
things. Would be good if now its time has come! :-)

I'll try to find time this weekend to set up a page on the wiki, if
someone
else (Frank, perhaps?) doesn't do it first. Setting it up takes little
time, but first I need to think about where to put it in the structure of
the Docs pages, so Frank doesn't have to move it later. ;-)


Jean, I'd suggest that before creating such a page or launching such a
project, that it might be a good idea to check to see if the Sun developers
already have something like this that could be made public. They have folks
who work full time on MS Office compatibility via both the binary and Ecma
376 formats. Bugs at either end of the round trip are undoubtedly a subject
of great interest to them.

While I agree wholeheartedly that such information would be of great value
to users, it would be a nightmare to maintain. Incompatibilities come and go
and undoubtedly many of them will be not only version-specific as to both
OOo and MS Office, but also variable by file formats involved. E.g., there
is no single DOC format, but version after version. Likewise, MOOXML is a
version 1.0 set of file formats that is undoubtedly getting bug fixes hot
and heavy. To boot, Microsoft has issued an MS Office 2007 Compatibility
Pack that retrofits all versions of MS Office from Office 2000 forward to
read and write to MOOXML. So there will be variables depending on whether a
specific version of MS Office has received the retrofit and it is too early
to tell whether that Compatibility Pack is going to produce identical
results in each of the retrofitted versions. And both OOo and MS Office
write to still other formats, such as HTML and RTF.

On top of that there's the complexity and variability introduced by the fact
that the version of Office Open XML submitted to ISO is not the version
actually used in Microsoft Office, but is a crippled subset. It is an
import-only format in MS Office. So now add the variability introduced by
the different plug-ins for going between ODF and MS Office, the Sun versions
(one for StarOffice only from the looks of its licensing) and the
Novell/Clever Age/ Microsoft versions. There is at least one other MS Office
plug-in under development, that of the OpenDocument Foundation.

And so far, I've only sketched the variabilities due to application
versions, file formats, file format versions, and file conversion engines.
That's all before getting to feature mismatches, application bugs at both
ends, the new MS Office "editions,"  whether bug fix patches have been
applied, on and on and on.

The short story here is that a wiki page is not, in my opinion, a sane
solution to the problem at hand. An SQL database or issue tracker would be
far more appropriate. In checking two relevant reports in the OOo bug base,
I did notice a field in them called "ms-interoperability." Perhaps someone
who knows the ins and outs of the issue tracker software might study whether
it is used consistently. I really have not used the issue tracker very much
at all and didn't figure out how to get a listing of all such issue
reports.  However, in checking the Help for the advanced issue tracker
search feature, it seemed pretty obvious that many search features have not
been enabled. It might be that if some of those features were activated, a
complete listing for that field could be generated and a query URL and
string for that field could simply be linked from the wiki.

But in any event, I suspect that the Sun developers either have such a
database for StarOffice or a "hit list" of interop issues they are working
on. In short, I'd check out other options before even considering a wiki
page for the problem. There are way too many variables and I strongly
suspect that keeping such a page current would not be a task that anyone
would want to take on. Doing it on a wiki page would be a task from Hell.
:-)

Best regards,

Marbux

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