The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Monday proposed adding Microsoft-developed Open XML to its list of approved open documents formats.
Massachusetts Monday presented its Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) 4.0 for public review and listed under the draft's major revisions the "Ecma-376 Office Open XML File Formats."
The draft is open to public comment until July 20th. The final draft, which will become official state policy, is expected at the end of the month, Massachusetts officials said.
Massachusetts has been at the forefront of a movement to adopt open-document formats, including the OpenDocument Format (ODF), as opposed to proprietary formats such as those in Microsoft Office.
Open XML was derived from Microsoft's Office Open XML (ooXML), which is the default file format in Office 2007 and was submitted to Ecma for standardization.
"[Open XML] does meet our criteria for an open standard," said Bethann Pepoli, acting CIO of the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD). "There is industry support for the format since it was approved in December."
The ETRM 4.0 draft cites Open XML support in Microsoft Office 2007, OpenOffice Novell Edition and NeoOffice 2.1. The draft also notes that Corel has announced Open XML support for WordPerfect 2007, and that Microsoft's Office Compatibility Pack lets Office 2003, XP and 2000 translate documents to and from Open XML Format for text, presentation and spreadsheet documents.
But Pepoli said adoption of Open XML is not a done deal.
"Someone could submit a comment and we could make a review of ETRM and make changes," she said. Those changes could include eliminating Open XML from ETRM in the final draft.
But Pepoli said the state needs to pick up the pace in adopting XML-based formats and we think now that "to have both formats will make it easier."
Massachusetts expects all its agencies to migrate to XML-based office document formats, a process that is under way. The majority of agencies currently have Microsoft Office 2003 deployed, according to the ETRM 4.0 draft. Microsoft offers a free Office Compatibility Pack to support use of Open XML.
Massachusetts is currently using the plug-in technology to support ODF while it considers way to serve people with disabilities that need magnifiers not supported by open office applications that use ODF.
ETRM states that Open XML "covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents... this XML-based document format was developed to ensure the highest levels of fidelity with legacy documents created in proprietary Microsoft Office binary document formats such as .doc, .xls, and .ppt."
ODF supporters picked up on the last statement in reaction to the news that Open XML was under review in Massachusetts.
"We completely agree: ooXML looks backward, while ODF is an international ISO standard, and is forward looking. The public understands this, too, as nearly 15,000 people opposing ooXML have signed an online petition circulated by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. We look forward to seeing the public discussion in the Commonwealth," said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source.
IBM was the only Ecma member to vote in December against standardizing Open XML. And in February, Microsoft published an open letter lashing out at IBM's aggressive campaign against efforts to anoint OpenXML as a standard.
The guidelines in ETRM 4.0 say Open XML in Massachusetts can be used for office documents such as text documents (.docx), spreadsheets (.xlsx), and presentations (.pptx), but is not restricted to those document types.
Massachusetts, which passed its open-document measure by executive policy decision in 2005, is the only state to have adopted an open document policy. Over the past few months, bills in Connecticut, Florida, Oregon and Texas were killed; a bill in California is stalled in committee; and a Minnesota proposal has been watered down to requiring the state's IT department to study the issue.
Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway are either testing or have approved open file formats.
Ecma is an international membership-based standards organization for information and communication systems. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) also is considering standardizing OpenXML.
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