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The software industry has rarely seen debates as intense as those surrounding OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (officially “Ecma 376 Office Open XML” [also known as ECMA-376 and OOXML]) during recent years. It's a story that has many elements appropriate for a James Bond movie, with multibillion dollar business empires at risk, global political intrigue, and even some conspiracy theories at the intersection of capitalism (commercial software products), democracy (industry standards), and communism (e.g., related standards controlled by the People's Republic of China). This is improbably heady stuff for what's ultimately a debate about something as mundane as file formats.
The ODF/OOXML debate is significant in part because it will have a major influence on the future success of Microsoft Office, one of Microsoft's largest and most profitable product families. If ODF, the primary rival to the Microsoft-sponsored OOXML format, prevails, ODF-based productivity application suites, including OpenOffice.org-derived products such as IBM Lotus Symphony, the Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org, and Sun StarOffice, may gain market momentum at the expense of Microsoft Office. The productivity application market shift to Extensible Markup Language (XML) file formats may also expand opportunities for software as a service (SaaS) alternatives such as Google Apps.
Standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) play a subtly significant role in the ODF/OOXML debate. While few people think of the W3C in productivity application domains today, both ODF and OOXML leverage W3C standards, and it's possible the productivity application model will hit a tipping point, with a focus on webpages containing document, spreadsheet, and presentation components displacing the traditional standalone productivity application file model.
From an enterprise perspective, the shift to XML file formats presents new opportunities for improved information management and reduced vendor lock-in. To exploit the emerging opportunities, organizations must understand how and why productivity applications have radically changed over the last decade. They must also undertake a mindset shift from application file management to XML content component management, with productivity applications serving more as specialized editors than stand-alone quasi-platforms. It's also critically important to provide tool selection guidance to information workers, to reduce the potential for defaulting to email messages with productivity application file attachments.
The recent industry debate about OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) often comes down to the blunt question, “Which one will lead?” There are three answers.
The first answer is, “It depends on who you are.” On one hand, government agencies and other organizations seeking to use a free, non-Microsoft productivity suite will be happy to use ODF, the file format behind OpenOffice.org (and derivatives such as IBM Lotus Symphony). On the other hand, libraries and large businesses, faced with storing and using years of Microsoft Office legacy documents, will prefer OOXML, as OOXML can more faithfully recreate the look and metadata (such as spreadsheet formulas) stored in Microsoft's binary file formats.
The second answer is, “Within the larger market, OOXML will lead,” for three reasons. First, many enterprises are not that caught up in the standards debate; they just want to use what works for their needs. Microsoft Office 2007 defaults to storing documents in OOXML format, so, by migrating to Office 2007, many companies will let Microsoft make the decision for them. Second, OOXML is an extensible standard. It allows vendors and enterprises to extend the standard within an OOXML-defined framework. For example, the .XLSM file format, used to support a Microsoft Office 2007 Excel macro-enabled workbook, is not part of the base OOXML standard, but rather a Microsoft-created extension. This built-in ability to augment the OOXML standard is a safety valve for future innovation, allowing new features to be added without forcing vendors to invent yet another separate file format or wait for standards bodies to give their approval. While such extensions initially decrease interoperability, it's Burton Group's belief that this issue will resolve itself over time, as popular extensions are adopted by other vendors or eventually move into the baseline specification. Third, OOXML supports “overlay” custom schemas (not in ODF 1.0, promised in ODF 1.2), which can be used as views into the business information stored in documents.
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