“As documents and services are increasingly transformed from paper to electronic form, there is a growing problem that governments and their constituents may not be able to access, retrieve and use critical records, information and documents in the future. To enable the public sector to have greater control over and direct management of their own records, information and documents, the ODF Alliance seeks to promote and advance the use of OpenDocument Format (ODF) as the primary document format for governments. The alliance works globally to educate policymakers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of the OpenDocument Format, to help ensure that government information, records and documents are fully and natively accessible across platforms and applications, even as technologies change.”
Microsoft Softens Stance: ‘We won’t sue OOXML Coders!’
March 28, 2008
In an attempt to garner more support for their OOXML document format, Micro$oft Corporation gave in to one of the biggest challenges presented by the open source community. This is good news, but there are many more issues to overcome before they can qualify as being truly “open”. The following article is an announcement by MS that it will not pursue litigation against coders as long as their work is attempting to improve open document formats.
Microsoft’s “Open Specification Promise” (OSP) Further Defined
from ZDnet.com
About the Open Document Format Alliance
March 18, 2008
The following was taken from the ODF Alliance weblog. This group is leading a worldwide effort to educate governments and technology coordinators. I hope this helps you better understand the Alliance and ODF.
Document Freedom Day
March 16, 2008
Set for March 26, the first annual Document Freedom Day is an event that hopes to raise awareness for increased accessibility to public documents. Currently electronic documents are saved in a great variety of formats (ie. .doc, .xls, .rtf, .ppt). If a computer user wishes to open a saved file in a particular format, it is necessary to possess or go purchase specific computer software. Propriety software companies reap in millions of dollars with each software upgrade that people run to the stores to purchase in order to read electronic documents.
Participants in Document Freedom Day will share information about the importance of a standard open document format so ALL people can read the documents that they access.
Hopefully this introduction to Open Document Format (click to download) provided by the Open Document Format Alliance along with Wikipedia’s description of ODF will help answer your questions about ODF and the efforts of the Alliance to educate the world. By continuing my research, I found the following .pdf (open format) slideshow created by the Open Document Format Alliance.
Open Document Format Slideshow
Stay tuned for more information.
