Opendocument News & Articles

 March 8 turned out to be Simon Phipps' last day at Sun (news, site) / Oracle (news, site). What does that mean for his pet projects, and Oracle's plans for Sun's open source properties?

Any day now (if not already), the newest version of Apache's Solr (news, site) project hits the streets. A year in the making since the previous release, the Java-based, open source enterprise search server Solr 1.4 offers some exciting feature and performance improvements.

Microsoft’s Open XML format has just been turned down for international standard status.

Microsoft reportedly fails two major criteria for standards designation under the rules of the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission.

It is not pleasant to complete a project in your format of choice, only to discover it does not comply with a sanctioned formatting standard.

With this frustration in mind, the OpenDocument Fellowship (ODF) brings us the ODF Validator, a simple tool you can use to verify whether your document complies with its formatting standards. Yes, these days even compliance can be solved with a widget.

In more standards news the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) recently announced that their members have approved OpenDocument Format (ODF) for Office Applications version 1.1 as an official OASIS Standard.

OpenDocument is a royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

This newest update provides users with important accessibility enhancements, ensuring that the OpenDocument format takes care of addressing the particular needs of people with disabilities.