Microsoft Vows to Open Office Document Format

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. last week said it will offer the XML document formats that are due to be used in the next version of Office as open standards, a move that's partly designed to appease government users who insist that their software be standards-compliant.
But it also is likely to escalate Microsoft's conflict with a group of vendors and users that is pushing the rival Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, as a global standard. And it's an open question as to whether Microsoft's planned submission of its Office Open XML formats to standards bodies will convince users that the software vendor is truly standardizing them.
David Chacon, a technical services manager at golf club maker Ping Inc. in Phoenix, said he will need some convincing. "I'm sure they're going to open up some portion of the [Open XML] spec, but it won't be truly usable without some sort of Microsoft hook or add-in," he said. "I'll believe it when I see it. And even when I see it, I'm not sure I'll trust it."
Microsoft appears to be trying to control the market instead of serving users, Chacon added. "I feel bad that they're doing [this] because of pressure as opposed to truly adopting it as a strategy," he said.
However, Peggi Douglass, IT director at Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA) in Montgomery, said the only reason she could imagine for switching the pension fund manager's 270 PCs from Office to rival software like OpenOffice in the near future would be if the state government mandated the use of OpenDocument.
OpenDocument "is a good idea, but it's going to cause a lot of short-term pain" for users who have to adopt products supporting that format, Douglass said. Although OpenOffice is free, the cost of retraining employees alone would ensure that using it wouldn't be cheaper than staying with Office, she said.
Even more important, Doug-lass added, is the fact that many of RSA's employees use custom-built or third-party applications designed specifically for Office.
Microsoft said it will submit the Open XML formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to Ecma International, a Geneva-based standards group. Ecma's evaluation process is expected to take about a year, and Microsoft said it will ask the group to submit the resulting standard to the International Standards Organization (ISO).
Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's information worker division, said the timing is designed to ensure that the Open XML formats are adopted as standards in time for next fall's expected launch of the next