The ODF Toolkit and Why It's Important

I’ve often thought that he office suite is a point of departure, not a terminus. As an ensemble of integrated tools that would allow a “knowledge worker” (white collar employee?) to survive in a modern bureaucracy, it is, to be sure, still immensely useful and an important. But it is also, as an ensemble, burdened with the expectations of the last century. One could have, for instance, a set of ad hoc tools that are distinguished from the suite proper and which are invoked as needed. What would anchor these tools, what would allow for things to be done without chaos intervening in the form of proliferating incompatibilities, as each new application saves your files in new ways is, simply, the deployment of an open, standardized, file format, in this case, the ODF.

Oh, I don’t mean to state or imply that OpenOffice.org is a has been; far from it. it is rather only now reaching its maturity, and with the new Extensions project, we expect it--like Firefox--to grow even more usable and more used, as millions of users learn how easy it is to use and customize. But not everyone will want an office suite. Some will want just some elements of it, or an application that has nothing to do with regular office suite functionality but which still--and this is the important part--reads and writes to the ODF. They may want, that is, an application that gives them freedom without sacrificing community. And they may further want for that application to have the some of the power and capability demonstrated by OpenOffice.org.

The new ODF Toolkit Project promises to do this and even more. Go to http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/ and see what we have. It’s just a start--we are announcing the project today--but it’s a very promising start.

I invite all developers to see what we have and to see what they can do. Let’s move beyond the office suite. It’s been with us a long time and it’s time to make something new.

For other takes on this, see the excellent GullFoss blogs....