Interoperability Is In the Eye of The Beholder

You know how they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder… well, I think the same applies when it comes to document interoperability. I had several interesting debates a few days ago with users who, due to the nature of their work, interact frequently with both OOXML and ODF documents. Even more than that, they quite often need to transform those documents from OOXML to ODF and vice versa.

Having written an earlier post about conformance testing, I was quite interested to see the perception these persons have about interoperability. Quite interestingly, we’re not talking here about IT professionals but more about high level information workers. As I expected, the views on interoperability expressed during the discussions were quite different from those I got from people heavily involved in the standardization processes. Some interesting conclusions I draw are:

• Regular people really don’t care about perfect standards-based transformation of documents. As long as they look pretty much the same and no information is lost, that’s just fine.
• Roundtrips occur far less than I would have thought. When I say roundtrip, I refer to the need to transform say an OOXML document into an ODF document and then, at some point in time back to an OOXML document. Much of the ‘academic’ debate in the field of standardization revolves around the roundtrip concept. Well, I have my doubts that this is actually a real concern.
• Formulas in spreadsheets are a real pain point. That’s were transformation between OOXML and ODF fails big time. And honestly, I don’t think it’s OOXML’s fault.

Obviously, these are just some let’s say empirical observations, but still, I guess they are an interesting indicator of the mismatch that exists between interoperability as it is perceived by information workers and interoperability as it is perceived by the standardization folks.