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 :)