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Revision of Key Features and Benefits of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) from Mon, 2006-08-28 20:04

Feature Benefit
OASIS standard Open, transparent specification process with multi-vendor participation
Approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 26300 Well known and broadly accepted standard
ISO standard Relax-NG schema types (ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003) Well known and broadly accepted standard
Supported by multiple applications Choice between free open source and commercial implementations including OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, IBM Workplace, Textmaker, Abiword/Gnumeric, Google Writely, and AjaxWrite.
Broad industry support ODF guarantees long-term viability. The OASIS ODF TC, the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, and the ODF Alliance include members from Adobe, BBC, Bristol City Council, Bull, City of Largo, Corel, EDS, EMC, GNOME, Google, IBM, Intel, KDE, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems. As of June 2006 the ODF Alliance has already more than 300 members.
Shipping products since September 2005 ODF files can already be created and used today. The first products with ODF support started shipping in September 2005.
Free open source “reference” implementations

ODF is supported by multiple free open source office applications including OpenOffice.org, KOffice and Abiword/Gnumeric. OpenOffice.org, for example, is developed by large community including vendors like Sun Microsystem, Novell, Intel, and Red Hat. Due to the availability of the source code, support for additional platforms or languages can be added by anyone.

ODF implementations available for all major desktop platforms Applications with ODF support are available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, the Solaris OS, Apple Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.<
Open standard W3C XForms technology is used for forms The forms concept integrated into ODF is based on the W3C standard XForms which is supported by multiple applications and vendors.
Reuse of existing standards where possible Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and to make interoperability as simple as possible, ODF reuses established standards like HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and Dublin Core.
Very mature The first work for the ODF file format started as early as 1999 (see the ODF history).
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