Better support for the proprietary XML format OOXML will make it easier for public administrations to move to vendor independent and free and open source office applications, say the organisers of the LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org-Workshop, scheduled to take place in Zürich, Switzerland, on 10 and 11 October.
Getting the document lay-out correct, tracking and accepting changes and saving documents in the proprietary format OOXML are among the most pressing issues for those public administrations that are not using the one proprietary office suite that defaults on OOXML, explains Ernst & Young consultant Matthias Stürmer, workshop leader.
He hopes the workshop will garner enough interest and financial resources to get IT service providers to implement the proprietary document format. "No stakeholder is willing to invest sufficient resources to accomplish this considerable development effort alone, when all the others will freeride on their work."
The meetings will bring together representatives from German and Swiss public administrations, including the city administrations of Freiburg, Munich and Jena, and from the Swiss federal court (Bundesgericht).
These are all public administrations that use vendor independent and open source office suites. A negative side effect of their strategy is that they experience problems when exchanging electronic documents with other authorities, the vast majority of which are locked-in by a proprietary office suite offered by a single vendor.
The IT department from the city of Freiburg, for example, has repeatedly expressed frustration over the lack of interoperability between the open source office suites and the proprietary one. "Two decades of monoculture in office applications mean there is no pressure on interoperability", lamented Andreas Kawohl, project leader on open standards at the city's IT department, at a workshop in July in Berlin aiming to improve ODF, an alternative and ISO approved document standard.
The two-day meeting in Zürich is supported by three open source advocacy groups, the Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open, the Verein Freies Office Deutschland and the German Open Source Business Alliance. "Registration is still open" says Stürmer, "and all other interested parties are very welcome."
More information:
IT Magazine news item (in German)
Inside IT news item (in German)
Verein Freies Office Deutschland