Massachusetts confirms moving away from Microsoft Office
September 24th, 2005 Leave a comment Visited 28 times, 1 so far today
Massachusetts confirms moving away from Microsoft Office
This is a first for a state in the USA. Massachusetts has confirmed that their executive branch agencies will adopt the OpenDocument standard by 2007 leaving aside the current default application MS Office. The state has finalized a proposed move to this open, nonproprietary format for office documents with plans of cutting costs in purchasing and upgrading proprietary software.
They also released a final version of its Enterprise Technical Reference Model on the state’s Web site. As per the plan, the state will support the newly ratified Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, as the standard for its office documents. OpenDocument is a file format based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) and covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. And it complies with the guidelines of the standards body OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards).
Some of the popular suites, which support these newly adopted formats, are OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, and IBM Workplace. The state would get its departments to migrate away from the current generation software to these open format-supporting applications gradually and complete the migration in 2 years time. Interestingly, Sun Microsystems is due to launch the next upgrade of their StarOffice suite soon and they would be interested in getting this project.
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June 22nd, 2006 at 02:03 pm
[...] This is great news for people who develop content using MS Office applications. The tool once installed would appear as a new option in the Microsoft Office applications. Using this tool would generate a Creative Commons logo, a short summary of the license chosen, and a hyperlink to the Creative Commons Web site. [...]