In 1985,
ESPRIT financed a pilot implementation of the ODA concept, involving companies such as
Bull,
Olivetti,
ICL, and
Siemens. The goal was to create a universal, storable, and interchangeable document structure that would remain usable over time and compatible with any word processor or desktop publisher. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the rapid spread of personal computers and the ease of developing software for early
PCs led to numerous word processing applications competing for market
dominance. Meanwhile, corporations transitioning from dedicated word processors to PCs faced a proliferation of proprietary file formats. By 1985, it was evident that this fragmentation would worsen, especially with the advent of
desktop publishing and
multimedia computing. ODA aimed to address the problem of software developers frequently changing native file formats to add new features, often breaking
backward compatibility. Older native formats were repeatedly becoming obsolete and therefore unusable after only a few years. This led to a large financial impact on companies that were using
ad hoc standard applications, such as
Microsoft Word or
WordPerfect, because their IT departments had to constantly assist frustrated users with transferring content between so many different formats, and also hire employees whose sole job was to import old stored documents into the latest version of applications before they became unreadable. The intended result of the ODA standard was that companies would not have to commit to an
ad hoc standard for word processor or desktop publisher applications, because any application adhering to a common open standard could be used to read and edit long stored documents. The initial round of documents that made up ISO 8613 was completed after a multi-year effort at an ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG3 meeting in Paris La Defense, France, around Armistice (Nov. 11) 1987, called "Office Document Architecture" at the time.
CCITT picked them up as the T.400 series of recommendations, using the term "Open Document Architecture". Work continued on additional parts for a while, for instance at an ISO working group meeting in
Ottawa in February 1989. Improvements and additions were continually being made. The revised standard was finally published in 1999. However, no significant developer of document application software chose to support the format, probably because the conversion from the existing dominant word processor formats such as WordPerfect and Microsoft Word was difficult, offered little fidelity, and would only have weakened their advantage of
vendor lock-in over their existing user base. There were also cultural obstacles because ODA was a predominantly European project that took a top-down design approach. It was unable to garner significant interest from the American software developer community or trade press. Finally, it took an extraordinarily long time to release the ODA format (the pilot was financed in 1985, but the final specification not published until 1999). Given a lack of products that supported the format, in part because of the excessive time used to create the specification, few users were interested in using it. Eventually interest in the format faded. IBM's European Networking Center (ENC) in Heidelberg, Germany, developed prototype extensions to
IBM OfficeVision/VM to support ODA, in particular a converter between ODA and
Document Content Architecture (DCA) document formats. It would be improper to call ODA anything but a failure, but its spirit clearly influenced latter-day document formats that were successful in gaining support from many document software developers and users. These include the already-mentioned
HTML and
CSS as well as
XML and
XSL leading up to
OpenDocument and
Office Open XML. == See also ==