Open Standards and Open Architecture – Avoid Painting Yourself into a Corner:

So What are Open Standards?

The Internaional Telecommunications Union (ITU), (a specialized agency of the United Nations), define Open Standards as follows:

"Open Standards" are standards made available to the general public and are developed (or approved) and maintained via a collaborative and consensus driven process. "Open Standards" facilitate interoperability and data exchange among different products or services and are intended for widespread adoption. - ITU.int

What is an Open Architecture?

Ken Krechmer defines Open Architecture in his paper on Open Standards as:

“Open architecture refers to a system whose internal and/or external interfaces are defined by open standards” - Open Standards Requirements, Feb 7 2005

The Open Architecture allows you to ‘plug-in’ to the application at points which suit your organization.  The Open Standards allow you to provide or consume data in common formats.  When done properly, the combination of these two facets will lead to systems with the following characterstics:

1. Easy to integrate. 
2. Easy to extend.  That is, you can often use these systems in ways that the original author did not forsee.
3. Interoperate well with other tool sets. This often results in a much lower overall total cost of ownership, lower risk, and richer feature.
4. Extremely flexible and can be often be integrated tightly into bespoke applications.

Note that it is generally a lot more difficult to write applications in this manner and requires a substantial commitment on the part of the developers.  For this reason, you find that many vendors do this with varying degrees of success.

In the field of Document Generation, our experience is that the Scriptura Product is the most open of any in the market place.

For more information please contact us.