Embracing Open Document Format (ODF)

   

(Article originally posted at InfoWorld Magazine)

Have you ever received a word document in email, only to find that it cannot be opened or edited by your version of the MS Office? Or perhaps you want to open a paper you wrote in 1996, only to find that you wrote it with Nisus on Mac OS 7, and you are now running Windows XP? Well, you can say goodbye to those days. It’s time to take a look at the format of the future: Open Document Format (ODF).

ODF is a new ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) that has already been adopted by several countries including Malaysia, Italy, and Belgium (and the state of Massachusetts). It is also backed by corporations such as IBM, Sun, Google, Red Hat, Novell, and Oracle. It is supported by applications such as IBM’s Workplace, Sun’s Star Office, the open source Open Office and KOffice suite, Mobile Office for your smart phones, and NeoOffice support for Mac is on the way. Heck, even Google Docs supports it, so when you receive a document as an email attachment, you can just open it up and edit it right there in your gmail! It would seem that everyone supports ODF, but the giant itself, Microsoft.

Until 4 days ago.

It was announced on 2007/02/02 (on sourceforge, no less), that the OpenXML Translator 1.0 is available for download. This enables users to use ODF in Office XP to Office 2007. There is also a proof-of-concept plugin for Microsoft Word 97 - 2007 that has been released by the Open Document Foundation.

ODF is not some distant, futuristic standard, it’s something you can start using right this moment. It not only makes document sharing a whole lot easier, it also ensures what you write today, will still be accessible ten years from now.

Josh Kuo
Co-Owner of q!Bang Solutions

Computer security explained for the masses

   

(Originally posted on InfoWorld Magazine)

It is often cited that the biggest issue in the fight against worms and viruses and other such malware is uneducated users. If a person doesn’t understand why it’s a bad thing to open email attachments from people that he doesn’t know, then you can bet that he will open every attachment which comes to him. Several email clients (not just MS Outlook!) will happily open and execute any Visual Basic or batch file that a user clicks on. Then wham! - You’ve got an infected machine that’s probably already calling home to the nasty individual who wrote the malware and now “owns” the user’s computer - which you as the IT department have to go and fix…

Of course the various network security and bug tracking sites are great about announcing the security flaws and exploits that are found, but arguably their audience is only people who are already pretty savvy about security issues. So I was pleased to see an article written more for public consumption at howstuffworks.com today, entitled “What’s the problem with Microsoft Word?”. The author, Julia Layton, does an excellent job of explaining some computer security jargon and bringing the layman up to speed with the MS Word zero-day flaws which were recently announced. I hope that this is a sign of a new trend of educating the end user in a comprehensible language.

When I was a full time sysadmin and helpdesk tech responsible for a few hundred users and 50 servers, I struggled to explain the same topics to the many end users individually. So instead, I sent out ocassional messages via email with some helpful tip on how to use their computer or a link to a web article that contained some useful information on a subject that I knew would tweak their interest. So I always had these sorts of articles bookmarked to send out to my users. They appreciated that I was trying to educate them and I appreciated that I had fewer infected machines to reformat and reinstall.

High Mobley
Co-Owner of q!Bang Solutions

Embracing Open Document Format (ODF) article posted to InfoWorld Magazine

   

Josh Kuo’s article Embracing Open Document Format (ODF) has been posted to the InfoWorld web site. Josh’s article discusses what the Open Document Format is, where it has support, and which major application <*cough* Microsft Word *hack* *cough*> does not
support it. But fear not! Josh has found a helper application to MS Word which will allow you to work with ODF right now.

“Get the facts,” a twisted campaign.

   

In this article EC: ‘Open source almost always cheaper option’, about findings of a study done by the European Commission, Europe is really pushing for the long-term endorsement of open source solutions as opposed to proprietary ones. This is in the wake of Microsoft UK’s ad campaign called “Get the Facts” which persuades readers to choose Windows over Linux for server solutions. The article goes on to praise Open Office as a comparable substitute over proprietary office suites since it’s free and just as stable. The study also noted something fairly interesting:

But the report issued two notes of caution. Firstly, it said that short term costs would be higher for organizations migrating, even partially, to open source, largely because of the initial cost of training. Secondly it said some workers may feel undervalued if they are required to work with free software.

This has a bite of reality to it. It isn’t always cheap switching to something free, once the price of adjusting or training is factored in. I like that second point the most, because although it may go against logic and the bottom-line, I have witnessed this stigma first-hand. Despite these two initial hesitations, we’re going to see an increasing number of start-ups and big-business choose or incorporate open source solutions to surpass their long term goals.