Belgians first with ODF: battle continues in Massachusetts

Stuart Corner
Monday, 03 July 2006 10:49

Business IT - Technology

Belgium and Massachusetts were the first two governments to embrace the concept of open documents. Massachusetts is facing fresh internal opposition to the move, but the Belgian Government last week became the first in the world  to commit to open documents.
 

Among government there has been growing concern about electronic documents  being held in proprietary formats, particularly Microsoft's, and interest is growing around the Open Document Format (ODF), a free XML file format certified as a standard by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in May.

The state Government of Massachusetts was due to implement a policy requiring all documents to be in ODF, which is not supported by current version of Microsoft Office, by 1 January 2007 but is facing another attempt by long term opponent of the plan, Senator Marc R Pacheco, a Democrat who is chairman of the oversight committee. He has issued a 31-page report condemning the decision by the state's Information Technology Division (ITD) to move to ODF.

According to one report, "Billions of software dollars hang in the balance of the closely watched measure, which could be a precedent and its provisions adopted beyond Massachusetts."

Meanwhile on 23 June the Belgium Government formally approved the use of the Open Document format as a way to exchange government documents. By September 2007 all Belgian federal agencies must use software that can read reports, spreadsheets, presentations and other types of data files saved in Open Document  and if there are no problems with this Government bodies could start to use ODF for document exchange within a year.

The Danish parliament last month also unanimously agreed on making the use of open standards mandatory in national IT solutions and software by 2008. ODF was not included in this decision, but it is expected to pave the way for ODF to become the official document format. Meanwhile the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation will take the first step by making all its documents as ODF by September 2006.

The Open Document Alliance was launched on 3 March 2006 with more than 35 initial members from a wide range of countries around the world ODF Alliance seeks to promote and advance the use of Open Document Format (ODF).