Reports and Whitepapers


burton group

What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, Open XML and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications
Burton Group
Authors, Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly

The Burton Group Research Directors Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly introduce OpenDocument Format (ODF), Office Open XML (OOXML), and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, and project their implications for future productivity applications in this in-depth paper. The report also highlights the significance of the productivity application market shift from binary and proprietary file formats to vendor- and product-independent Extensible Markup Language (XML) models.

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Ecma Office Open XML

Ecma Office Open XML and the Road to Standardization
Microsoft Corporation

With the growing support of Ecma Office Open XML in the community this compilation highlights the need, opportunity, and adoption that is occurring around the globe.

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IDC

Adoption of Document Standards
IDC, Framingham, Massachusetts, USA
Sponsored by: Microsoft Corporation

In a commissioned research sponsored by Microsoft, IDC surveyed 200 organizations, 100 in the United States and 100 in Europe, to better understand which factors drive adoption of open document standards. In their analysis of survey results, IDC notes, "The uptake of XML-based standards seems stronger in Europe than in the United States, but in both geographies, the dominant XML standard deployed is Office Open XML. Open Document Format (ODF) is receiving some attention in the public sector but is not as widely used as Office Open XML even here." Among survey highlights, companies having an interest in Office Open XML will be piloting or fully deploying the standard in one year compared with today. Although ODF is a standard with a longer history in the market, it shows a different pattern. In one year, most of the companies showing an interest in ODF will still be in the consideration phase rather than the "pilot" or "fully deployed" phase.

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The Government at the Standards Bazaar
Stanford Law and Policy Review
Stacy Baird, Author

This paper explains the benefits of government restraint in mandating technology standards and provides an analytic framework by which policy makers can consider specific cases. The research was published in the Stanford Law and Policy Review, and copyrighted in 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Breaking Down Digital Barriers: When and How ICT Interoperability Drives Innovation
Urs Gasser and John Palfrey

In November 2007, a significant and far-reaching new international study on interoperability was released by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law, University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The study concludes that the private sector should lead interoperability efforts, that there are multiple paths to interoperability, and that increased interoperability fosters innovation.

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Office Open XML Presentation
British Library
Adam Farquhar, Author

A presentation created by Adam Farquhar, the head of e-architecture at the British Library and a member of the committee that worked on the standard at Ecma, that provides an overview on the virtues of Office Open XML and how digital libraries and archives have benefited from using this standard.

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Accessibility of Ecma Office Open XML File Formats
Microsoft Corporation

Open XML formats support accessibility in a number of ways. In explaining this support to its customers, partners, and assistive technology vendors, Microsoft has created a preliminary draft report describing how Open XML compares to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and W3C XML Accessibility guidelines.

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Office Open XML Overview
Ecma TC45
Tom Ngo (NextPage), Editor

The emergence of four forces — extremely broad adoption of the binary formats, technological advances, market forces that demand diverse applications, and the increasing difficulty of long-term preservation — have created an imperative to define an open XML format and migrate the billions of documents to it with as little loss as possible. This white paper provides Ecma International's view on Open XML and why it should be an ISO standard.

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