SALT LAKE CITY, UT -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/14/08 -- Burton Group, an IT research firm focused on enterprise infrastructure technologies, published an extensive overview of the productivity application market debate between the OpenDocumentFormat (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) standards, providing strategic recommendations for enterprise IT organizations.

In the report, "What's Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications," VP and research director Guy Creese says it is important for organizations to discount the political posturing in the ODF/OOXML debate and focus on the emerging opportunities, noting that the W3C model, building on XML, CSS, and other W3C standards, is ultimately going to be more pervasive as the market shifts from file-based to hypertext models.

"Enterprise organizations must undergo a mindshift away from the traditional stand-alone productivity application model," says Creese. "Blogs and wikis and other web-based tools are changing the industry to a web-centric model that will include webpages containing document, spreadsheet, and presentation components."

In the short term, Burton Group recommends enterprise IT organizations exploit the XML-based formats; for a variety of reasons detailed in the report, OOXML adoption will outpace ODF adoption. "OOXML is a better form-follows-function fit for most productivity application usage patterns," says Creese, "and much to the chagrin of Microsoft competitors, Microsoft does appear to be sincere in its efforts to make OOXML a meaningful global industry standard."

Because this is an important issue in the productivity applications market, Burton Group has made this report available to the public. Go to http://www.burtongroup.com/Guest/Ccs/WhatsUpDoc.aspx for complimentary access. Additional insight can be found by visiting Burton Group's Collaboration and Content Strategies blog http://ccsblog.burtongroup.com.

About Burton Group

Since 1990, Burton Group (www.burtongroup.com) has provided research and advisory services helping Global 2000 organizations make smart enterprise architecture decisions. Burton Group provides a suite of context-oriented analysis and a proprietary IT Reference Architecture covering security, identity management, application platforms, service-oriented architecture, network and telecom, collaboration, content management, and the data center. Uniquely focused on the need of IT buyers rather than technology providers, 85% of Burton Group's revenue comes from end-user organizations.

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