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MassGov Declares OpenDocument the Standard File Format for the Commonwealth

Posted by swhiser on Aug 31, 2005 11:36 AM
Lxer; By Sam Hiser

First Reported on Lxer -ED

The State of Massachusetts -- home of The Boston Tea Party, The Battle of Dorchester Heights and other underdog victories -- today released the draft document (for review & comment up until September 9) which would be the basis of the State's policy on acceptable document file formats.

Among other information standards issues covered in the document, Massachusetts declares the following formats to be the targets of migration policies:

-OASIS OpenDocument for Text, Spreadsheet & Presentation files (.odt, .ods, .odp) Migration Target: January 1, 2005
-Plain Text Format for Text files (.txt)
-Hypertext Document Format for Web Pages (.html)
-Portable Document Format for Other Documents (.pdf)

Among the applications supporting OpenDocument are OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 and 2.0, StarOffice 8, KOffice 1.4, Workplace as well as, to some partial degree, AbiWord, eZ publish, Knomos, Scribus and TextMaker. Others will follow.

The State CIO requests our comments on the document by September 9, 2007.

From Peter Quinn, Chief Information Officer, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts...

"We just published a new draft version of our Enterprise Technical Reference Model for public review available at http://www.mass.gov/itd (see feature story in the center of the page). The revised version of the Data Formats section begins on page 16 and identifies the newly ratified OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as our standard for office documents. Additional open and acceptable formats are also identified for other types of documents. Again, we would love to hear your comments and suggestions. Please forward your comments to Standards [at] state.ma.us by September 9. I would also appreciate your assistance in spreading the word about this public review so we can get the broadest input possible. Thank you."

Download the pdf here .

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