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Office goes Live

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 16:53

Simon Jones finds that, for a freebie, Microsoft's Office Live Workspace is a powerful web storage and sharing tool.

Alphabet soup

That master of abbreviation the International Standards Organisation, as represented by ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 - the committee in charge of Office document file formats - has had another meeting, this time in Okinawa, Japan, where it tackled the maintenance routines for ODF and interoperability between ODF and OOXML. With all the alacrity of a three-toed sloth on Mogadon, the committee discussed said maintenance (or lack of) with OASIS attending in disembodied form via teleconferencing. Nothing was decided, except that a document will be prepared to be discussed again at the next meeting in March in Prague. On interoperability it was mooted that "Topic Maps" might be used to describe all the different features of both standards in a third, XML-based language, so that the two maps could then be merged to show where the features overlapped and where they differed. Like many people, I thought that this work had already been done many times over - if perhaps not using the same methods - by the various bodies that already have document format converters up and running. Why do I feel an overwhelming urge to shout "Get On With it!" in the general direction of ISO?

Wither OpenOffice? (sic)

The number of programmers actively working on OpenOffice is dwindling month by month as Sun reassigns them to other duties, and since their places aren't being filled by people from other contributors or from independent developers, the project is now limping along with around 25 developers (down from a peak of 70 in 2004: source Michael Meek of Novell's analysis of OpenOffice source control data). Novell is taking up some of the strain, but that isn't enough to halt the decline. OpenOffice is a good product - not great, but good enough to give Microsoft some competition in the marketplace - and its competition is vital to ensure innovation and reasonable prices. The little guys each have a market share that's vanishingly small, but OpenOffice has enough users for Microsoft to take notice.

What OpenOffice needs now is a push for usability and interoperability, but a bit of effort on performance speed and reducing its memory overhead wouldn't go amiss either. OpenOffice takes ages to load and open a document compared with Microsoft Office on a similar document, but this is a David and Goliath situation: Microsoft can afford to have hundreds of people working on Office because it's directly paid for, whereas OpenOffice - being free to users - doesn't have the money to spend and relies on large corporations such as Sun, IBM and Novell donating programmers and their time (along with a few independents who do it for free).

Sun sells a paid-for version of OpenOffice called Sun StarOffice; Novell sells a version it guarantees to keep up to date with patches and better support. IBM took the OpenOffice code, wrote a new front-end and called it Symphony, but still gives it away in the hope it will tempt you to also buy its Lotus Notes and Domino products. The big guys in OpenOffice development will have to step up to the plate soon if they want OpenOffice to continue to thrive. In these straitened times, it would be too easy to cut back and lose the momentum.