IBM and Sun Microsystems are rallying industry support
for the Open Document Format (ODF), the open-source file and
document sharing specification.
Open Document competes against the likes of Adobe’s Portable
Document Format (PDF) platform and Microsoft’s fledgling XPS
electronic document format.
A meeting set up by IBM and Sun will take place tomorrow in New
York with a variety of leading software suppliers on hand to
discuss how ODF can be more widely adopted in applications.
The meeting will discuss areas including the wider marketing of
the technology and how ODF can be more easily implemented by
users.
Novell, which recently joined the ODF technical committee,
overseen by the Oasis standards body, will attend, as will Red Hat
and others.
ODF is currently supported by the OpenOffice.org productivity
suite, Sun's StarOffice 8 collaboration software and IBM
Workplace.
The state of Massachusetts is considering rolling out
applications that work to ODF, meaning Microsoft Office
applications may not be usable for some state business.
Microsoft recently said that its forthcoming Office 12 suite
would support an XPS file formatting option as well as native PDF
creation.
Microsoft currently has no plans to offer native ODF
support.