Sam Hiser: “What Does the [ODF] Plugin Accomplish for Organizations?”
On his blog PlexNex, Sam Hiser asks What Does the Plugin Accomplish for Organizations?
He writes:
“Among the sappers of office-worker productivity is MS Office Version Madness, which describes the document incompatibilities arising from Microsoft’s customary changes to its document file format recipes in Word 6.0, Office 95, 97, 2000 and XP which make documents inaccessible with various permutations of office suite versions and make everybody enormously frustrated and which also harm productivity in just about every office setting. (I needn’t go into it because the experience is universal among this white-collar PC-using audience; however, I might add that the end of Version Madness is also a very attractive prospect to individual PC users at home, school or SoHo.)
The Plugin ends Version Madness because it provides a single, unified file format in which all modern versions of MS Office can work — file conversions going both ways — as well as handles repeated round tripping smoothly.
For state governments, like The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was the very first organization to put out a call to hear if any such Plugin might exist, the move to the open standard OpenDocument Format is intelligent and wise. The strong case for ODF in the document-centric business processes of regional, state & municipal government will eventually be universally obvious.”