ODF support in Office 2007: end of an era
On Tuesday April 28 2009 Microsoft released SP2 of Office 2007, making its flagship Office product the last of the major office suites to move to ODF. "In a way it is the end of an era," says Bert Bakker, chair of OpenDoc Society. "Vendor based formats have dominated the last twenty five years of IT to the extreme point where billions of investments in software - even in entirely unrelated areas - were steered not by technical and security considerations but by what was used on the desktop productivity suites."
In the press
Read about OpenDoc Society in the global media, e.g. New York Times, China Post, The Guardian, Cuba Headlines...
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Here comes Officeshots.org
The Dutch government program "Netherlands in Open Connection" and
OpenDoc Society have announced they are collaborating on an online
document factory to compare office suite applications. The free
webservice Officeshots.org should be available by the end of February
2009. Users will be able to online compare the output quality of a large
number of office suites as well as web-based productivity applications.
The collaboration was announced during a well visited ODF conference in
Maarssen, The Netherlands. The project is financially supported by a
grant from the Netherlands based not-for-profit investor NLNet Foundation.
read more at officeshots.org
OOXML published
On November 20th 2008 ISO published IS29500, an archiving format for legacy documents from vendor Microsoft. At the moment there are no implementations of IS29500. Because there are some efforts to align the work on IS29500 with that on ODF (IS26300), and there is no real quality assurance mechanisms for its implementation, it may be interesting to read the 7228 pages that together compose the new format.
read more at ISO
NATO chooses ODF as mandatory standard
On of the worlds largest treaty organisations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has adopted ODF as its format of choice. The new NISP framework calls ODF a mandatory, part of a clear trend among governments to favour open standards and ODF in particular. This provides an important inroad for governments in Europe and North-America. The deprecated binary formats from the Microsoft Office suite are to be phased out, and not to be used in new applications anymore.
read more at NATO
Microsoft to support ODF not OOXML in Office 2007
Various sources report on Microsofts announcement that after the next Servicepack their Office suite will natively support ODF. This is seen by many as a decive moment for the market, with ODF virtually blanketing the entire document market. The European Commission has announced that they will closely monitor Microsoft's behaviour in the light of their current investigation into illegal anti-competitive practices at Microsoft. With the intended standardisation of Microsofts own archiving format OOXML now put to a halt, and governments worldwide demanding and adopting ODF, the future looks bright for ODF.
Podcasts available
The podcasts and presentations from the launch event in the Royal Library in The Hague are available! Hear Patrick Durusau (editor of ODF), ir. Karel de Vriend (Head of IDABC), Dr. Peter Vandenabeele (Fedict, Belgian Federal Government), Bert Bakker (director of CMC) and Frank Heemskerk (minister of Foreign Trade of The Netherlands) talk about the sea of documents and ownership of your own content, open standards in public administration, the rationale for the foundation of OpenDoc Society and the state fo interoperability.
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Board announced
The founding board of OpenDoc Society will consist of Bert Bakker (director of Center for Media and Communication - chair), Michiel Leenaars (director ISOC.nl, manager at NLnet foundation and policy advisor at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research - secretary) and Bob Goudriaan (financial specialist and informal investor - treasurer).
South-African Government chooses ODF
Open Document format (ODF) became an official standard for South African government communications as of October 24th. The ODF standard is included in the government's Mininimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS). In the foreword to the document, department of public service and administration minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, says that "this updated version of MIOS contains an explicit definition of open standards as well as the inclusion of the ISO Open Document Format". ODF is one of three formats specificed for "Working Office Document formats". These are: UTF-8/ASCII formatted text, OpenDocument Format and comma separated values.
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