Massachusetts backs down on Office Open XML ban

Stephen Withers
Friday, 03 August 2007 08:01

Business IT - Technology

The Massachusetts government has reversed its ban on the use Microsoft's Office Open XML file format by state employees.

The state had previously rejected OOXML in favour of the broadly supported Open Document Format. But Henry Dormitzer, Undersecretary of Administration and Finance, and Interim Commissioner, Department of Revenue, announced "we believe that the impact of any legitimate concerns raised about either standard is outweighed substantially by the benefits of moving toward open, XML-based document format standards. Therefore, we will be moving forward to include both ODF and Open XML as acceptable document formats."

"The ETRM articulates a vision of a Service Oriented Architecture where information can be shared, re-used and re-purposed based on XML technologies. Document formats play a part in this vision by serving as containers for the information rather than being the end goal," he added. "The availability of open, standardized XML document formats without vendor bias will move us further along in realizing this vision."

Although OOXML is a Microsoft-specific format, it has been approved as a standard by ECMA and is under consideration by the ISO.

ODF is supervised by the OASIS consortium and backed by companies including Adobe, IBM, Intel, Novell and Sun, and has already been approved as an ISO and IEC standard.

Novell has created an OOXML translator for its version of OpenOffice, while Microsoft sponsored an open source project developing an Office add-in to translate ODF documents.