Sanity Check

Update: This post is of course now obsolete with the newest versions of Symphony capable of reading the dreaded DOCX. Add to this MS' admission that ODF won (by virtue of their planning to add ODF support to a future Office service pack) the crisis is over.


Well  its happening...an employee today received a DOCX file from a supplier via e-mail and is asking around IT about how he can open it. We told him to tell them, as they are a supplier and we're in control, to resave the document in Office 2003 (.doc) format and send it back to us. This time it wasn't the CEO, but its inevitable that pressure will build over time to provide a native solution for these file types.

Now from what I've heard, there are no plans for Symphony, embedded in Lotus Notes 8, to support OOXML files even for importing. This is strange as Sun is adding OOXML support to their OpenOffice with the logic that if we can get documents into an ODF editor, we can save them as ODF for long term storage.

In a similar vein, for years we received those pesky windat files from misconfigured Exchange servers and after the old "tell them to fix their server" explanation grew thin, we were able to use utilities to extract the email and attachments, and finally in Domino 7.0.2 IBM relented and now windat's are intercepted and decoded at the server.

Will IBM make an about face "in the fullness of time" by providing an OOXML import filter in Symphony? And will they make this too late after we've already been told by the CEO to go out and buy Office 2007 for everyone?

Sticking your head in the sand, pretending that OOXML files are not going to land in your Inbox is simply naive and not a winning strategy IMHO.

What do you think?