Last week, Microsoft released 2007 Microsoft Office System Service Pack 2. And boy are the sharks swimming in the water.
Before I go on, I want to state where I stand - I really do not care about what games anyone wants to play when it comes to interoperability. Period. I have always been the guy who played in both sandboxes - Lotus and Microsoft. It started out as being the guy who figured out how to make Ami Pro drive Excel via DDE. Then it was Word Pro and Access. Office and Notes. Visual Studio.NET and Domino Web Services. SharePoint and Lotus Symphony. VSTO and XPages (coming to a user conference this August). I love being someone who isn't pigeon holed into one technology or camp. So as application automation morphs into document generation in the next couple of years - I want to work with both OOXML and ODF. PSC is already working with OOXML and ODF with our customers. In the end, I do not care which 'wins'
Since the release of SP2, both IBM and Adobe have come out and been very critical of the release. Adobe is taking aim at the PDF tools that are now included 'in the box' ... which you could download from the Microsoft web site for the past two years. Adobe's complete Acrobat toolset has add-in's for creating PDF within Office - which is a very good tool. Gray Knowlton covers a bunch of the details. Read for yourself and decide what you think.
With ODF, Rob Weir of IBM took Microsoft to task with issues that have come up with formulas in spreadsheets. Doug Mahugh answers back. After being poked by Nathan with his tests, I did some of my own and have found that both scenarios, the one that Rob and the one that Doug lay out, are repeatable.
I am not going to get into the middle of either discussion. I just want to point out something Doug has done - Microsoft