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Open document format puts an end to being locked into vendors and technologies
File format incompatibility has been a major hindrance in relief efforts around the globe9/15/2006 11:55:00 AM By: Vawn Himmelsbach
There's already an alphabet soup of standards out there. So why are so many governments getting excited about ODF? Open Document Format, which was developed by the OASIS industry consortium and uses the XML format, recently became an international standard for saving and exchanging office documents, such as memos, reports, spreadsheets, databases and presentations.Still not convinced? Consider this: The Bangkok Post reported that file format incompatibility allegedly hindered government recovery efforts after the 2004 tsunami. Since then, the Thai government has made open file formats an immediate priority. But open standards have not been relegated to “developing” nations. In the U.S., for example, victims of Hurricane Katrina who requested aid on the FEMA Web site had to use Internet Explorer. Got Linux? Sorry, out of luck.
More than 280 organizations in 43 countries are part of the ODF Alliance, including Google. A number of governments are also behind it, including Belgium, Denmark, France, India, Thailand and, most recently, Malaysia. In fact, Malaysia has proposed that ODF become a national standard by the end of this year and has recommended it for use in the public sector.
In Belgium, all document exchanges within government must be in an open, standard format by September 2008 - and only ODF is accepted as an open standard. The Danish parliament has unanimously agreed to make the use of open standards mandatory in national IT solutions by 2008, paving the way for ODF. And India is piloting deployments of ODF software within government departments.
So what exactly is this acronym all about? ODF was developed by a number of organizations, so it can be used for free in any software, whether it's open source or proprietary, from desktop packages such as open source Open Office to commercial software such as IBM Lotus.
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