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Right now the barriers to transition from MS Word format to
OpenDocument are mostly cultural: as long as there's somebody you
must obey who will ask, "Can I have that in MS Word?", it's tough to
switch over because the WYSIWYG doesn't transform _perfectly_
(mostly spacing issues in tables, headers, and footers). You want
them to see _exactly_ what you see, need to be sure of it.
Still, a lot of files are transmitted in MS Word to users who don't
need (and perhaps shouldn't have) write access. Finished documents,
after all, should have one owner. If your culture can adapt to
"source and maintain in ODF, distribute in PDF" -- which is easily
done with OpenOffice, StarOffice, and KOffice today, and with MS
Office in the future -- you'll be able to switch sooner. And in
that case there's no end to version control options that meet your
criteria.
(Note that if you're heavily invested in VBScript, you've got
another barrier: client-side scripting depends on client
capabilities, and MS Office apps are the only ones that process
VBScript. But in a world where it can't be assumed that a user's
ODF client is, say, MS Word, VBScript is toast anyway.)
Anyhow, any decision made today about a version-control scheme for
MS Office documents should acknowledge that it's a stop gap, needed
for perhaps two years at most. There's additional peril if your
solution is SharePoint, since that seeks to curtail your options in
new ways.
> Recent versions of MS Word allow you to save documents in XML formats;
> I even read recently that in the next version of MS Word, MS will
> support the open-document format used by OpenOffice, StarOffice, and
> others (through an optional, free, plug-in).
The MS Word OpenDocument add-in is here, at SourceForge:
Note that it's quite beta and useful only to testers of Word 2007.
The OpenDocument Foundation has designed its own conversion add-ins
for MS Word versions dating back to Word 97, which are in late testing:
WebWorks ePublisher Pro for Word features support for every major Help
format plus PDF, HTML and more. Flexible, precise, and efficient content
delivery. Try it today!. http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l
