The government of Australia is seeking comments on a draft policy that will make support for the Open Document Format a requirement for office productivity tools used by the administration.
"Consideration has been given to the common document format to be supported by office productivity suites in use by Government agencies", writes John Sheridan, the Australian government's chief technology officer. "The new draft now requires that office productivity suites must provide support for at least version 1.1 of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF)." He adds that the policy is not making the use of ODF mandatory.
Writing on the website of the government's Information Management Office, he invites readers to review the documents and provide comments.
Flexibility
The CIO lists six examples of office suites that currently provide whole or partial support for ODF. Sheridan: "Support is available from a wide range of office productivity suites across a variety of operating system platforms, in both open source and proprietary implementations, allowing agencies a great deal of flexibility in selecting a product."
Many European governments have policies that require their administrations to support the use of ODF. Examples include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Poland. A 2010 report by the now defunct ODF Alliance lists 12 European countries with policies on ODF. The European Commission's Directorate General for IT has created an online service allowing anyone to convert ODF into legacy proprietary office formats.
More information:
Australian government request for comments on ODF policy
IDG news item
H-online news item
Linux Magazine news item (in Spanish)
Linux Magazine news item (in German)
Joinup blog post
European Commission's ODF online converting service