Microsoft, Government, and OpenDocument Format
On July 5, Microsoft announced creation of a plug-in (officially titled "Open XML Translator") enabling MS Office users to save documents in the XML-based OpenDocument Format (ODF). An article published in GCN on July 17 discusses potential impact of this move on how government and industry organization archive and exchange information.
Below are a few interesting quotes from that article that clearly highlight the rationale behind the governments requiring the ODF functionality in office applications:
-- "Government records should be free of any proprietary software dependencies. We cannot defer to commercial vendors the prerogative for determining the formatting and structure of records that are inherently governmental in nature" /Owen Ambur, chairman of the Federal CIO Council's XML Community of Practice/
-- A document saved in a standards-based format ensures that, even if the original program is no longer available, another program can be written to view the documents, using the specs
-- "Governments should not require citizens to use a particular commercial product to view the data they are interested in seeing, and ODF can help increase the number of possible applications available" /Simon Phipps, chief open source officer for Sun Microsystems/
Technorati tags: United States, Government, Information Management, Document Management, Open Source, XML, Information Technology
Below are a few interesting quotes from that article that clearly highlight the rationale behind the governments requiring the ODF functionality in office applications:
-- "Government records should be free of any proprietary software dependencies. We cannot defer to commercial vendors the prerogative for determining the formatting and structure of records that are inherently governmental in nature" /Owen Ambur, chairman of the Federal CIO Council's XML Community of Practice/
-- A document saved in a standards-based format ensures that, even if the original program is no longer available, another program can be written to view the documents, using the specs
-- "Governments should not require citizens to use a particular commercial product to view the data they are interested in seeing, and ODF can help increase the number of possible applications available" /Simon Phipps, chief open source officer for Sun Microsystems/
Technorati tags: United States, Government, Information Management, Document Management, Open Source, XML, Information Technology
posted by Editor @ 8:55 PM
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