Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (46 mails)

[Ian Lynch <ian.lynch@xxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 15:06 +0100, Adrian Wells wrote:
> > ignore, laugh and fight stages. The use of Open Standards is certainly a
> > high profile theme with BECTA these days but there is massive inertia in
> > the system. Even with committed people now its going to take years,
> 
> How high profile?  

Director level interested enough to come specifically to meetings and to
start organising meetings to learn more. New CEO is being appointed so
that could have an unpredictable effect.

> MS-Office is/will(?) purportedly be using the open
> standard

MSO will use Microsofts claimed open standard. AFAIK there are no plans
for MSO to support ODF which is currently going through the ISO process.

> for office file formats, so that MS-Office and OpenOffice can play nicely
> together.

Both standards are XML based and so its likely that file interchange
will be achieved with pretty good fidelity though not as good as if both
used ODF as their default.

> *** Will that be the same open standard that MS use for web development?
> So, a true open standard, or a special MS flavour of it? :D

Given current trends, its likely that if MS flavourise new products and
break agreed standards, there is a good chance they won't get taken up.
On that score at least, the gravy train is rapidly approaching the
buffers.

-- 
Ian Lynch
www.theINGOTs.org
www.opendocumentfellowship.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk