Hi all,
Recently I wrote an article on how Microsoft announced their competing
Office Open XML standard, just a few months after the OASIS OpenDocument
standard was adopted and Massachusetts announced that all state
documents would need OpenDocument capability by 2007.
I also videotaped an Open Document Format debate between Microsoft's top
Washington lobbyist and the Executive Editor of ZDNet at last Fall's
Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies.
http://www.cmsreview.com/Videos/Gilbane/OpenDocDebate.html
Now Microsoft has surprised everyone with an Open Source project, hosted
on SourceForge, to provide a translation facility from Word to
OpenDocument. This will work in earlier versions of Word, not just the
upcoming Word 2007.
I have noted that many content management professional still work in
Word, even when preparing content for our CM Pros website.
http://www.cmprofessionals.org
That introduces some pesky problems, like Word's smart quotes and their
em-dash, which show up as unrecognized characters in HTML and break XML,
including RSS feeds from our CM Pros bloggers.
Quite often, our blog aggregator software (Drupal) fails to parse an RSS
feed. The most frequent error is a character that is invalid XML -
usually from text copied and pasted from Word. The result is that those
bloggers don't appear on the CM Pros home page until the offending post
is no longer in their feed.
Here is the article - Open Office Wars:
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=15295&AuthorID=155
And here is Brian Jones, Microsoft Office Program Manager, describing
their embrace of OpenDocument.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/07/05/657510.aspx
Cheers,
--
Bob Doyle
Editor In Chief, CMS Review - http://www.cmsreview.com
Technology Adviser, CM Pros - http://www.cmprofessionals.org
Contributing Editor, EContent Magazine -
http://www.econtentmag.com/About/AboutAuthor.aspx?AuthorID=155
President and CEO, skyBuilders - http://www.skybuilders.com
77 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: +1 617-876-5676 Skype:bobdoyle
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