[Watford] Comments please - before Wednesday

[Alain Williams]

The UK Government is talking about adopting .ODF document format (ISO/IEC 26300
& successors). Unsurpsisingly Microsoft is pushing for the adoption of its Open
XML (ISO 29500) alongside.

Their key point seems to be that MS Office is widely used and that it's .docx is ISO
29500[**] and so is the de-facto standard - it would thus need a lot of
retraining, document conversion, ... of .odf were to be adopted as the UK
government standard. Also PCs would need to be updated to have s/ware that
supported .odf

[[This ignores that MS Office did not fully support OOXML until MS Office 2013.]]

MS says that it would be costly and unnecessary to focus on ''too narrow a
selection of standards''.

This ignores that standards are for the long term; even if there is a cost at
adopting .odf this will be repaid over the many years that it is used.

There is an introduction on El-Reg here:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/22/microsoft_uk_odf_response/

You can make comments here (a simple, painless registration is needed):

    http://standards.data.gov.uk/proposal/sharing-collaborating-government-documents#comment-form

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
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