Interoperability

ODF Plugfest, Berlin

August 9, 2011

I attended the 6th ODF Plugfest took place in Berlin a few weeks ago, hosted by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi).    It followed the pattern of previous events,  a two-day event,  with the first day dedicated to technical interop activities among implementors, followed [...]

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Best Practices for Authoring Interoperable ODF Documents

March 10, 2011

In the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC we have recently started work on a new document, a “Committee Note” which will be called, “Best Practices for Authoring Interoperable ODF Documents”. I will be the editor for this document. If you are not yet familiar with a “Committee Note”, it is a new category of [...]

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ODF Plugfest — Brussels

October 28, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I was in Brussels to participate in the 4th ODF Plugfest.  I planned on writing up  a nice long post about it.  But right when I started to draft this blog post, I came across an excellent article in LWN.net by Koen Vervloesem (Twitter @koenvervloesem): ODF Plugfest: Making office tools [...]

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The Battle for ODF Interoperability

May 17, 2009

Last year, when I was socializing the idea of creating the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, I gave a presentation I called “ODF Interoperability: The Price of Success”. The observation was that standards that fail never need to deal with interoperability. The creation of test suites, convening of multi-vendor interoperability workshops and plugfests is [...]

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ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability: Theory and Practice

March 1, 2009

This is a follow up to some work we did at the ODF Interoperability Workshop in Beijing last November. We had good participation there: IBM, Sun, Google, Novell and Redflag from the big vendor side, as well as a good number of users. It was a full-day workshop and we covered a number of topics. [...]

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Introducing the ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC

September 25, 2008

A short tale, all true, to relate. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. Years ago, but not so very long ago, when XML still had that new car smell, two companies, let’s call them Red and Blue, decided to make a new XML-based standard. This new standard would be, they claimed, a [...]

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Interoperability the ELIZA way

February 18, 2008

Back in the days before the Web, before GUI’s, before PC’s, before many of you were even born there was ELIZA. The brainchild of Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was a 1966 computer program that seemed to understand. I’m sure we’ve all played with ELIZA or variants over the years. I remember playing it during lunch in [...]

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Cracks in the Foundation

October 7, 2007

You must admire their tenacity. Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Paul E. Merrell (aka “Marbux”) . The mythology of Silicon Valley is filled with stories of three guys and a garage founding great enterprises. And here we have three guys, and through blogs, interviews, and constant attendance at conferences, they have become some of the [...]

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An Invitation: ODF Interoperability Workshop

August 2, 2007

The OASIS ODF Adoption TC is organizing an ODF Camp to be held on September 20th in Barcelona, Spain. Facilities for this event are graciously provided by OpenOffice.org, which will be holding its annual conference concurrently. The hope is that this will be the first of several such events to bring ODF vendors together to [...]

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