OpenDoc or Irrelevance: A User View of OpenDoc Benefits and Why the Customers and Business Partners of Lotus Development Corporation and Other Software Vendors Need To Have These Firms OpenDoc-Enable Their Software Products July 1996 Background ---------- I work for a company that is one member of a confederation of about 70 companies. During 1996, I will be connecting to our inter-company electronic mail environment. Currently, about half of the companies have gateways between their inhouse mainframe and/or LAN based email system and our current inter-company electronic mail system. In our environment, I expect a mix of inter-company electronic mail. The electronic mail will mostly use ASCII or Microsoft Office 3.x, 4.x formats. There will also be some Lotus SmartSuite document formats and some Corel WordPerfect Suite (formerly called Novell PerfectOffice) document formats. Initially, I expect little or no use of OLE objects or ActiveX Objects (Note 1) inside the electronic mail documents. However, over the next one or two years, I expect the number of OLE-enabled compound documents (documents with OLE objects inside them) to grow significantly. I will need to be able to edit some of these compound documents and some of the OLE objects inside them. I and many other Lotus SmartSuite users in our confederation and in other businesses and homes will have THE REQUIREMENT. THE REQUIREMENT: LOTUS SMARTSUITE MUST BE ABLE TO EDIT MICROSOFT OFFICE OLE OBJECTS INSIDE COMPOUND DOCUMENTS. OpenDoc Equivalent Editors, THE REQUIREMENT and Lotus Smartsuite ---------------------------------------------------------------- According to the IBM Visual Revolution roadshow that I attended in June of 1995 (see Attachment - point 1), OpenDoc has the benefit of being more flexible than OLE when editing objects inside compound documents: - OLE requires the user to use the exact editor to edit an object inside a compound document. For example, Excel must be used to edit Excel objects inside a compound document. In general, Microsoft Office/Office95/Office97... is the only OLE-enabled software office suite that can edit Microsoft Office/Office95/Office97... objects inside a compound document. - OpenDoc allows the user to use an "equivalent editor" to edit an object inside a compound document. For example, an OpenDoc-enabled version of any spreadsheet that has import/export conversion filters for Excel formats, e.g. Lotus 1-2-3, Mesa Spreadsheet for OS/2, Quattro Pro or StarCalc could be used to edit Excel objects inside a compound document. In general, any OpenDoc-enabled office suite that has import/export conversion filters for Microsoft formats should be able to edit Microsoft Office/Office 95/Office 97... objects inside a compound document. Lotus SmartSuite 4.0 for Windows and Lotus SmartSuite 96 for Windows 95 support OLE and cannot fulfill THE REQUIREMENT. Lotus SmartSuite 96 for OS/2 Warp does not support OLE or OpenDoc and cannot fulfill THE REQUIREMENT. However, Merlin, the code name for the next version of OS/2 Warp, which is currently in beta test, will support OpenDoc. This is a start. Furthermore, a rumor says that the Merlin BonusPak will be OpenDoc-enabled. This might help with THE REQUIREMENT if the following were true of the IBM Works component of the Merlin BonusPak: 1. IBM Works becomes a series of OpenDoc parts. In particular, the word processor and the spreadsheet become OpenDoc parts. 2. IBM Works includes import/export filters for file formats for current suites: Office 4.x, SmartSuite and Perfect Office. As an extra piece of information, the Office 95 word processor (WinWord 7) and spreadsheet (Excel 7) are supposed to use the same file formats as the Office 4.x word processor (WinWord 6) and spreadsheet (Excel 5) respectively. IBM MUST MAKE SURE THAT IBM WORKS IS OPENDOC-ENABLED AS DESCRIBED ABOVE. However, an OpenDoc-enabled BonusPak will only carry me (and other users) so far. The functionality of the IBM Works word processor and spreadsheet are only a small subset of the functions included in Microsoft Office/Office 95/Office 97 and SmartSuite 96/SmartSuite 97. I and many others require Lotus SmartSuite to become OpenDoc-enabled. Otherwise, in the current marketplace with Microsoft Office's 80 percent market share, we will have to transfer our activities eventually to Microsoft Office/Office 95/Office 97... This conclusion is supported by a telephone call-in survey that Computer Reseller News published in it April 22, 1996 issue and reported in the May 6, 1996 issue on page 17: "After cutting its prices on SmartSuite, will Lotus grab more market share from Microsoft Office?" Yes: 22 percent No: 78 percent In other words, if and only if Lotus and IBM OpenDoc-enable SmartSuite as a series of OpenDoc parts, will they be able to grow SmartSuite's market share significantly. OpenDoc Benefits for Lotus SmartSuite Beyond Equivalent Editors --------------------------------------------------------------- Using OpenDoc equivalent editors to achieve interoperability with Microsoft Office is the "ante" for introducing an OpenDoc-enabled Lotus Smartsuite into an otherwise Microsoft Office-dominant environment. An OpenDoc-enabled version of Lotus Smartsuite would provide other significant benefits to users beyond interoperability (see Attachment - points 2, 3 and 4). The examples described in Attachment points 2, 3 and 4 show that compound documents built using an OpenDoc-enabled version of Lotus Smartsuite can contain richer content and richer internal and external linking that are limited only by the imagination of users (and of course, the variety of available OpenDoc parts). By comparison, documents built using Microsoft Office and OLE Controls (OCXs) are more limited and provide mostly modest automation of what were previously manual document processes (e.g. clipboard) or simplified demonstrations of the possibilities of compound documents (e.g. activation of irregular shaped picture of an object inside a rectangular frame). All of the four benefits of OpenDoc listed in the Attachment would justify introducing an OpenDoc-enabled Lotus SmartSuite into environments with significant amounts of Microsoft Office and would also give Lotus a sustainable competitive advantage in environments that had not yet established an office suite standard. OpenDoc Benefits and Lotus Notes -------------------------------- Furthermore, Microsoft is reported to be tying Microsoft Office into Microsoft BackOffice, including Microsoft Exchange, the client/server electronic mail product. Microsoft has added replication for nomadic users to Exchange. Finally, Microsoft is Internet-enabling Office 97 (much as Lotus has Internet-enabled parts of SmartSuite 96 and is further Internet-enabling SmartSuite 97) and BackOffice (much as Notes is being further Internet-enabled). As these Microsoft product improvements occur, corporate users of Microsoft Office seem ever more likely to want to buy Microsoft Exchange. They will only buy Lotus Notes in situations in which they believe they have true groupware applications (beyond Microsoft Exchange's capabilities) for which they wish to commit development and support resources. In other words, if Lotus does not OpenDoc-enable SmartSuite and grow its market share, sales of Lotus Notes will also be negatively affected in one to two years. On the other hand, if Lotus OpenDoc-enables SmartSuite and Notes, Notes and the Notes Value Added Resellers (VARs) could add value through sales of SmartSuite in many situations that would otherwise be closed to them. OpenDoc Benefits and Other Software Products -------------------------------------------- The analysis of the benefits to Lotus Smartsuite users, Lotus Notes users and Lotus Business Partners of OpenDoc-enabling Lotus Smartsuite and Lotus Notes extends easily to users and business partners of most other software products/vendors. The most obvious example of another product that would benefit from OpenDoc-enablement is the other major software suite, Corel WordPerfect Suite. Lotus Smartsuite and Corel WordPerfect Suite are competing to establish themselves over the short and medium term as having the largest office suite market share behind Microsoft Office. The analysis of the benefits to users and business partners from OpenDoc-enabling a software product can be generalized to most other software products. OLE technology reinforces the dominance of any OLE-enabled product that has the largest share of its market. As this analysis shows, OpenDoc-enabling any other product that is second, third,... in its market will give that product a competitive advantage. Furthermore, the market leader is unlikely to become OpenDoc-enabled because this will encourage further OpenDoc-enablement, interoperability and use of the superior benefits of OpenDoc over OLE. In other words, OpenDoc-enabling any other product (besides the market leader) is likely to be a sustainable competitive advantage against the market leader. ---- Attachment Comparison of OpenDoc vs OLE Benefits Original Source: IBM Visual Revolution Roadshow, June 1995. Presenter: J. C. Love The following are notes that I took at the roadshow followed by some other notes from earlier information that I gathered elsewhere (Notes 2 and 3). Furthermore, I have subsequently updated this information with more fully detailed examples. 1. Editing of embedded objects. - OLE requires the user to use the exact editor to edit an object inside a compound document. For example, Excel must be used to edit Excel objects inside a compound document. In general, Microsoft Office/Office95/Office97... is the only OLE-enabled software office suite that can edit Microsoft Office/Office95/Office97... objects inside a compound document. - OpenDoc allows the user to use an "equivalent editor" to edit an embedded object in a compound document. For example, an OpenDoc-enabled version of any spreadsheet that has import/export conversion filters for Excel formats, e.g. Lotus 1-2-3, Mesa Spreadsheet for OS/2, Quattro Pro or StarCalc could be used to edit Excel objects inside a compound document. In general, any OpenDoc-enabled office suite that has import/export conversion filters for Microsoft formats should be able to edit Microsoft Office/Office 95/Office 97... objects inside a compound document. 2. Number of active objects. - OLE only supports one active object at a time inside a compound document. One use of OLE in which one active object at a time inside a compound document is insufficient is when object 3 is linked to object 2 which is in turn linked to object 1. In the article 'It's No Easy Matter Saying OK to OLE", PC Week, May 6, 1996, p 74 is the following report of what happened when this was tried using the Windows 95 versions of Microsoft Word and Excel with three embedded Excel objects inside a Word document. The test using OLE did not work: "Forced to live with OLE's limitation for the time being, I created a third object that referenced the second. Apparently, cells containing interobject references cannot themselves be referenced from yet another object. OLE was crashing and burning around me." - OpenDoc supports multiple simultaneous active objects inside a compound document. The following example is typical of the types of uses of multiple simultaneous active objects within a compound document that marketing analysts, financial analysts and others might wish to make. In this example, there are four objects inside the compound document: Object 1. Region 1 spreadsheet Object 2. Region 2 spreadsheet Object 3. National spreadsheet = Region 1 + Region 2 spreadsheets Object 4. National graphic as bar chart of data in Object 3, national spreadsheet. The objects in the example are linked as follows: - Object 1 is linked to Object 3 which is linked to Object 4 - Object 2 is linked to Object 3 which is linked to Object 4 As can be seen from the PC Week article, this scenario does not work with OLE. However, it should work with OpenDoc. Furthermore, it is easy to make the scenario more complicated. Another category of applications in which multiple simultaneous active objects are required is in situations in which several independent, constantly changing objects are running. These objects might be digital video, audio, high speed graphical data display (e.g. stock ticker) or some other type of dynamically changing object. 3. Shapes - OLE only uses active areas that display as rectangular shapes in compound documents. (see Note 2) Many real world objects (e.g. automobiles, machine parts, etc.) and knowledge worker objects (e.g. maps of multiple geographic regions and slices of a pie chart) are not inherently rectangular and must be individually enclosed in a rectangular frame if they are to be OLE objects. - OpenDoc can use active areas that display in any shape in compound documents. The above examples can be OpenDoc objects and do not need to be enclosed in a rectangular frame. 4. Dragging of nested objects. - OLE only supports dragging of a nested object inside of an outer object inside a compound document. One example of this is a text, voice or video annotation object that is attached to an object that is inside a compound document. If the user later decides that the annotation needs to be moved outside of the annotated object (perhaps to another object inside the compound document or perhaps just to some specific location in the body of the compound document), then the user will have to copy the annotation, delete the original annotation and then paste the copy in the new location. - OpenDoc supports dragging of a nested object to outside of an outer object in a compound document. If the above example were created using objects that are OpenDoc objects, then the user could drag the annotation to the other object inside the compound document or to the specific location in the body of the compound document. Notes: 1. In early 1996, Microsoft renamed OLE objects to be ActiveX objects and renamed OLE Controls to be ActiveX Controls. This analysis uses the OLE name because it is more familiar to users and also because it is more descriptive. OLE originally was the abbreviation for "object linking and embedding". 2. Microsoft says that they will extend OLE to support active areas that display in any shape in compound documents. I believe that no date has been announced for this improvement in OLE. 3. Microsoft seems to have implemented (perhaps only in beta test) the ability of OLE to support overlapped objects. Concluding Remarks The author, Jonathan Handler, welcomes comments, constructive criticism and additional information. The author may be contacted via Compuserve: 71702,1620, or via the Internet: 71702.1620@compuserve.com.