Until now, many state and local governments, as well as the Europe Union, have been looking for a standard document format that doesn't tie them to Microsoft. But there was no easy way to transition away from Office. The ODF plug-in is a major piece of technology -- albeit a first step -- to facilitate the migration to a completely open suite based on ODF.

"I'm very surprised [end-users] see something of value without it even being explained," Edwards says. Using ODF, he says, content management systems will allow users to upload open docs and repurpose them in a server environment that can be synchronized in a local environment. "You would have a local hard disk with a dumping spot that is synced and available to workgroups," Edwards says.

If you want to manage something at both the human level and the machine level, you need structure. With ODF, machines now have the instructions to do their mission, embedded inside the document itself, portable and self-contained.

Advanced metadata based on open XML documents will allow users to narrow searches to concepts and ideas, rather than stringing together meaningless keywords. You end up with documents that can be used by information systems or individuals, and with applications that can grasp the content and the semantic meaning of the document.

Edwards says ODF, with its interaction capability and portability, was written so that applications and computer systems will still be able to make use of ODF files 200 years from now. I think ODF is the next step on the evolutionary tree of interoperability. If evolution is all about survival of the fittest, Edwards is right.