Evenas the Blu-rayvs HD-DVD bat¬tle is heading to its logical conclu¬sion (of co-existence or the lack of
it), another format war has reached its crescendo - the war of office suite for¬mats. Microsoft recently approached the International Standards Organization (ISO) for a fast-track decision on the adoption of its format, which is used by Office 2007, as a certified global format. ISO, which has already ratified the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, announced on September 5th that Mi¬crosoft's format, the Open Office XML (OOXML) failed to get a 'resounding yes' from its panel consisting of technology companies and all the UN member nations.

The final ratification ofOOXML as a stan¬dard by the ISO will now have to wait till February next year, when the ISO will hold a ballot resolution meeting and Microsoft will be asked to address and counter the concerns, apprehensions and brickbats put forward by various participating countries. In other words, Microsoft has about six months to beef up the OOXML format to suit international standards and gather more support.

Microsoft has already started its en¬deavor to mend the biggest flaw of OOXML- interoperability. It has under¬taken to beef up its partnership with ven¬dors to tackle interoperability issues in design, technology and standardization. It has also announced a continuing col- laboration with AOL and Yahoo! for in¬stant messaging, and Novell for virtual¬ization applications, besides the creation of what it calls the Interoperability Vendor Alliance. But its biggest achievement in this regard is said to be the successful deployment of what it calls the Open XML Translator, essentially a combination of tools that allow translation between ODF based applications and OOXML formats, the source code for which is available un¬der what is called a BSD license. Having got its roots from Berkeley Software Dis¬tribution, BSD represents a family of free¬for-use software licenses worldwide.

Divided supporters
While HP, Intel, EMC, Sony Electronics, Apple and Lexmark International have come out strongly in support of Microsoft, Oracle and IBM continue to support ODE Germany and the US voted in favor of Mi¬crosoft, while Britain and France voiced a clear'no'but were open to supporting Mi¬crosoft in future if'vital modifications' are incorporated in the OOXML structure. In¬dia preferred to follow this argument, though initially it went all out against Mi¬crosoft.As expected, the technical institu¬tions, IITs and IIMs are completely in sup¬port of ODF, and believe that the OOXML is not 'open' enough to be certified as a global standard, as it doesn't represent a common ground across products. They argue that ODF has originated through a process of evolution and right since its in¬ception, it has been completely 'vendor neutral'.

ODF is the brainchild of Sun Microsys¬tem's Open Office, formerly known as Star Office, started off in 1999 by Star Division, as an attempt to build a non-proprietary XML-based interoperable office suite. A year later, Sun Microsystems acquired Star Division and for the next two years, all it did was to invite source codes through an open-to-all licensing mechanism. An XML community project was also em¬barked upon, and the two finally united in December 2002, at an OASIS (Organiza¬tion for Advancement of Structured Infor¬mation Standards) conference, where the arrival of ODF was formally upheld.

Vendor support
But it was only in May 2006, after regular overhauling, public consultations and two enhanced draft versions of the format were released, that the ODF achieved ISO certifi¬cation. The next obvious step was to consol¬idate this fete by attracting other software creators into adopting the ODE One of the first to oblige was Adobe, which up¬graded its PDF format to sync up with ODE In July 2006, Google joined the ODF bandwagon by allowing compatibility of its online Office suite, Google Apps (which in¬cludes individual applications like Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets) with ODE Besides Google and Adobe, the ODF loyal¬ists' club includes founder members IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and Novell.

The simple idea of designing a skeleton for software developers to build their appli¬cations on, specifically office and word pro¬cessing applications,and requiring them to only tweak the backend system to suit their needs did the trick for ODE To simplify things further, the ODF architecture has sub-divided the systems into convenient and flexible components - Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Mathematical Formulas (MathML), Embedded links (XLink), Synchronized Multimedia Integration Lan¬guage (SMIL) and Forms definitions (XForms), each of which is built on Open Source platform. While SVG is an XML specification that allows scripting for static and animated graphics,MathML integrates mathematical formulae into WWW docu¬ments, and XLink allows the inclusion of hyperlinks within XML documents. Xforms, originally designed for XHTML, incorporates the Web Forms functions into the application while SMIL is the language for describing multimedia presentations within an XML based framework.

was introduced as part of Office 2003 suite. Back then, data was not compressed and was stored in a single XML file, with binary data, like images, being repre¬sented as BASE64 strings. This is a positional notation process that uses the alphabets A-Z and numerals 0-9 for first 64 digits of the code, while the last two digits are various combinations of num¬bers and digits with specific tags.

But during the development of Office 12 (more popularly known as Office 2007), Microsoft resorted to following an ODF model by storing data in a number of small packet files, each of which are embedded within a .zip file. Having got this format cer¬tified by the European Computer Manufac¬turers Association (ECMA), Microsoft ap¬proached ISO for certification.
At the very basic level of document read¬ability, both ODF and OOXML work in the same way, and no visible difference can be observed in terms of 'openness'. But the shortcoming clearly lies in two depart¬ments - backward compatibility and gen¬eralization across platforms. In that re¬spect, ODF and OOXML were created for two distinctly different purposes. While Microsoft intended the OOXML to be in sync with the feature set of Office 2007, and make it backward compatible with earlier editions of the suite, ODF began as a general document markup format, cre¬ated for and by Linux enthusiasts.As Open Source grew out of Linux boom, so did ODE Hence, it can be compared to what HTML did to Web pages. As of now, ODF has come to be known as a format that is conducive to creating new office suite applications that wish to be called 'Open Source suites;' which in turn trans¬lates as a format that encourages compe¬tition and development of new products, each similar to the other. Contrary to this, OOXML ensures that nobody can clone the Microsoft model of Office, while pay¬ing more emphasis on detail and smooth operation.

User interest
By the time the ISO panel meets in Febru¬ary, Microsoft should make the OOXML 'open' enough for use by any third party de¬veloper, who in all probability, will belong to the open source community. The devel¬oper should be able to use, modify, interop¬erate and sync up existing and newer applications on the OOXML platform. This will ensure two things - a certain similarity of the OOXML to ODF in terms of flexibility and interoperability and two, a major chunk of Microsoft's proprietary Office backbone thrown open for external devel¬opers to modify and create new applica¬tions. From the users' perspective, this would mean an automatic sync up between multiple office suite applications, irrespec¬tive of which vendor they have purchased it from. When two or more office suites begin 'talking; to each other, it will create room for better usability, synchronization and the ability to invoke specific applications from other suites, if needed.

For instance, a doccument or spreadsheet you have created us¬ing one vendor's application, can be opened and modified in another's - because they would have been created around the same universal format. For a developer, this means a massive broadening of arenas for collaborations, XML-based programs that blend across different products and appli¬cations,and a com mon skeleton that can be done up the way your unique application demands. If all goes well, this fete will be achieved by the end of February, after ISO's final meeting to settle the ODF versus OOXML battle.