Mart Muller's Weblog

Good to hear that Office 2007 SP2, which is on the calendar for the first half of 2009, will support the Open Document Format (ODF, 1.1). There is a lot of discussion going on about the support for ODF or OpenXML, especially for governmental use.

From the press release:

"The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1. "

Check out this document.

P-Members voting: 24 in favour out of 32 = 75 % (requirement >= 66.66%)
(P-Members having abstained are not counted in this vote.)

Member bodies voting: 10 negative votes out of 71 = 14 % (requirement <= 25%)

Approved

There is a lot going on here in The Netherlands (and some other countries) about whether how 'Open' the government must be when it comes to software and standards such as ODF. The discussion is valid I think: in my opinion the government must be able to operate independent and open. The discussion that is going on here however, has some annoying aspects.

In the discussion (is it a discussion anyway?), the politicians are telling us (the people that work for the government) which technique we should use, instead of which guidelines we should follow. It's valid to say that the format of documents should be 'freely' readable and must confirm to certain standards and usability guidelines. It's not good that 'they' decide if we should use PDF, DOCX or ODT extension to store documents.

The discussion is also based on personal opinions. Basically it's Microsoft vs.. something 'Open'. To be honest, I don't really care about the Office version or which software vendor is chosen to install on the clients in our local city hall. What I do care is that the government is saying us what not to use. Basically they are saying: you can use everything except Microsoft.

Anyway, Bart Wessels (yes he's a Microsoftie, but he knows what he is talking about) has been posting a lot (in Dutch) about the ODF/OpenXML discussion. Check out his blog, and this article in particular. Some more information from 'Economische Zaken' about the use of open software can be found in this document.

By the way, I've been trying to open and store ODF documents in MS Office and found an OpenXML/ODF translator addin for Office. Check out the free downloads here. When making the screen shot I received the ironic alert which I didn't want you to miss :)