The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is to be the standard format for exchanging documents within the Belgian government. This proposal, which is expected to be approved by Belgium's Council of Ministers on Friday, increases the pressure from governments worldwide on Microsoft to embrace open standards.
From September 2008 onwards, all document exchanges within the services of the Belgian Government will have to be in an open, standard format, according to the proposal now before the Belgian Ministers. Only ODF is accepted as such a standard in the proposal. Earlier drafts of the Belgian proposal had treated ODF and Microsoft's own Open XML format (which is to be included in Office 2007) on equal footing.
Peter Strickx, general manager for architecture and standards of Fedict, the organization that coordinates the ICT policy of the Belgian Federal Government, commented on the proposal in an interview with ZDNet Belgium.
"Increasingly, we are seeing e-mail and electronic documents being used in communication between citizens and the government and between companies and the government", said Strickx. "To avoid becoming dependent on any particular supplier, we are moving towards open standards." A draft of ODF was accepted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in May.
From September 2008 onwards, Belgium's Federal services must use ODF when exchanging documents, though other formats will still be allowed for internal use, Peter Strickx confirmed. However, Belgium is leaving the door open for Open XML.
"Open XML today does not exist, as there is no product on the market that supports it. Once it is available as a product and proposed to the ISO, it is possible that the format will also be accepted," said Strickx. However, there will be an additional hurdle. Open XML must also be proven to be easily convertible to and from ODF.
This would appear to set Microsoft before a simple choice: convince the Belgian government that Open XML is an open standard well on the way to ISO-approval, or support ODF. The latter may be the simpler task, as the OpenDocument Foundation is already working on a plug-in for Microsoft Office that would add ODF support.
However, Strickx would not confirm that the Belgian Government is envisaging a migration away from Microsoft Office and towards software that supports ODF, such as Open Office. "We are analyzing the impact" of the move to an open format for document exchange on the internal software usage, said Strickx.
Belgium would be the first country to opt for open document standards in this way.
According to Strickx, this Belgian strategy is likely to gain a following. He claimed France and Denmark are considering similar moves.
Talkback
This isn't a blow to Microsoft since all that's required from Microsoft is that it listens to its customers. Surely every vendor in every industry would want to do exactly that. And given Microsoft's enormous innovative powers and R&D budget it should be boringly easy for them to include an additional file format, handed on a silver platter with no strings attached no less, in their "state of the art" and 'future proof" Office product line. In fact, Microsoft is so customer friendly and always has the interest of tax payers in mind that they're more then likely to provide a free update to previous and current versions of Office so that those too can read and write ODF fully functional with no strings attached whatsoever.
As always though, actions speak louder then words.
What do you want to do today? Well, I want to be able to communicate worry free electronicly with the growing number of people, customers, clients, partners and organizations that for some reason or another choose to adopt a non Microsoft related format. OpenOffice and a few others can already do that. Surely Microsoft Office products are soon to follow. Because what a strange world it would be if your choice of word processer and such determines with whom you can exchange simple word documents and such electronicly. No government would want to enforce such limitations on its citizens and other organizations are well advised to take that into account as well.
If MS really supports XML, it could easily choose to support OpenDocument. One of the marketing claims has been that MS Office can support arbitrary XML schemas. If that claim is true then MS Office more or less already supports OpenDocument. However, it may well be the case that these marketing claims are in fact false.
Furthermore, it does not cost MS anything to use OpenDocument, the standard is freely available and MS has been invited and encouraged repeatedly to join in the process.
Even if MS fails on OpenDocument, a plugin is already available from a third party.
I am glad to hear of the support for the OpenDocument format. Over the years many different file formats have come and gone, so (personally) I try to use a standard or open file format rather than a proprietry one, prehaps the only exception being pdf.
Files may be distributed not just within an organisation. between computers on different platforms and also between organisations (private, government and NGO), perhaps even between organisations in different countries. Some computer programs can be expensive, even unavailable in some parts of the world. Even if an organisation can afford the latest software upgrade, it may not run on the available hardware.
Oh whatever happened to OpenDoc?