Summary of the first event

At the personal invitation of the Netherlands minister of Foreign trade different implementers did work side by side - from large corporations to startups, from desktop apps to web tools - to find areas where implementations vary due to possible ambiguities or needs from applications that are not yet met.

But this was merely the beginning: in fact, participants like the concept so much that they really want to continue to improve interoperability by uploading tests scenarios to this wiki, carefully executing the steps and note down the results. While face-to-face meetings are indeed extremely valuable, one has to take into account that it's not always possible to meet in real life due to financial and logistics reasons.

So we'll continue the work on the wiki and organize new events, allowing both the participants and the experts who couldn't make it to be part of the action.

• It really was a succes, participants were testing various implementations, including AbiWord, EuroOffice, GoogleDocs, KOffice, Lotus Symphony, MS-Office 2007, the ODF-converter and OpenOffice.org.
• Some participants were even actively punching in code to improve the interoperability of their products, during the event itself. That's some real commitment !
• The result is that many participants (including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) are eager to continue to use the plugtest wiki - kindly provided by the OpenDocSociety - as a communication tool. While face-to-face meetings are indeed very valuable, it's not always feasible to gather so many participants from across the globe into one physical location.

Using this virtual approach, together the participants will actively improve interoperability on an on-going basis by:

• submitting and performing new scenarios
• analyzing and discussing issues found during these tests on the wiki, in a constructive way
• fixing bugs in implementations when they clearly violate the specification(s), in a timely manner
• actively trying to find solutions for interoperability issues, honoring the “be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send” principle when feasible
• paying attention to real-world interoperability demands from end-users and customers
• providing detailed feedback to the various ODF TC's in what areas the specification needs to be corrected or clarified

• Embedded objects
• Support for form controls
• Default margins etc

• It would be great if all implementers could publish their implementer notes, and make them available for download as a single XML file
• There was a proposal to push OpenFormula forward once it's stable (without having to wait until all parts of ODF 1.2 are approved), and use it as an interoperable format for ODF 1.1 formulas as well
• A discussion on keeping foreign / unrecognised elements and attributes when round-tripping.