[OpenDoc Announce] Press release: "ODF support in Office 2007 is end of an era"

[Mailing list for announcements for all OpenDoc Society members]

"ODF support in Office 2007 is end of an era"
Future proof format now available to entire market

                                           Amsterdam, April 29 2009

OpenDoc Society congratulates Microsoft Corporation Inc. with the
release yesterday of Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 for Office 2007,
Microsoft Office is the latest of the major Office suites to offer
native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF). OpenDoc Society is
happy to see Microsoft finally join vendors and open source communities
like IBM, Google, Sun Microsystems, Novell, KOffice, Corel and Adobe -
which already made the switch to ODF in recent years.

"In a way it is the end of an era," says Bert Bakker, chair of OpenDoc
Society. "Vendor based formats have dominated the last twenty five
years of IT to the extreme point where billions of investments in
software - even in entirely unrelated areas - were steered not by
technical and security considerations but by what was used on the
desktop productivity suites."

The new released SP2 finally brings native ODF 1.1 support to Microsoft
Office 2007 (meaning it can fully replace the deprecated .doc, .docx,
xls, .xslx, ppt and pptx formats) after two years of 'unofficial'
support through an add-in which was initiated and paid for (but not
formally supported) by Microsoft. It is especially important for any
Microsoft customers which adopted the deprecated Office 2007-specific
formats docx, xlsx and pptx - which were introduced as default formats
when Office 2007 appeared. Since these have meanwhile been superceded,
use of those formats is not to be recommended.

Many governments have actively been adopting an open standards policy,
with ODF being one of the prime drivers. Governments and customers have
grown increasingly vocal in making it clear to vendors that they would
take their business elsewhere if they did not move to support open
standards. 'Moving to ODF even if you stay with the same vendor an even
the same product is plainly good IT governance, as it provides better
security, compliance mechanisms and usability while at the same time
diminishing the depencies on any single vendor", says Michiel Leenaars,
vice-chair of OpenDoc Society. "We recommend companies, governments,
and users at large to just make the switch and set the new format as
their default as soon as possible - let's put a halt to the creation of
'new' legacy documents as soon as possible. We'll thank ourselves for
doing it later".

With the last of the major vendors moving to ODF, OpenDoc Society notes
that this clears the way for a lot of innovation in both offline and
online office tools that were made possible by the Open Document
Format. Most notably the Society expects to see the rise of smart
documents that merge online 'web of data'-like features with more
traditional desktop use. OpenDoc Society intends to actively help
these new products and services to converge and interoperate better on
behalf of users and consumers.

With all major office solutions now being able to use ODF, the focus of
software producers and customers should be on getting products that
generate or process documents  - like electronic mail filters, content
management systems, document repositories and BI tools - to take
advantage of the many opportunities ODF brings.

OpenDoc Society strongly urges large document users like governments
and companies, as well as individuals, to look at the currently
proposed ODF 1.2 specification as well as the call for input for the
next major version of ODF that will follow the pending release of 1.2.
The OASIS Technical Committee currently welcomes any comments on its
committee draft [2].

[1] http://www.officeshots.org
[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=office

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For more information:

  Michiel Leenaars
  OpenDoc Society Nederland
  tel: +31 6 27050947
  mail: michiel [@t] opendocsociety.org
  sip: michiel [@t] nlnet.nl

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*** About OpenDoc Society

The goal of OpenDoc Society is to bring together individuals and
organisations with a stake or interest in the openness and future of
documents to learn from each other and share knowledge. OpenDoc Society
offers a platform where developers, publishers, decision makers,
educators, vendors, IT managers, academics, writers, archivists and
other stakeholders kan bring their knowledge together and learn and
collaborate with interesting like-minded people. OpenDoc Society wants
to build local human networks of experts and stakeholders in ODF from
all areas. It want to be a leading organisation in spreading knowledge
about open format like ODF and PDF to society at large, through
publications, workshops, masterclasses, tutorials for developers,
decision makers, users and other stakeholders. It wants to foster and
strengthen the ecosystem around open document formats: from enterprise
content management, assistive software for the visually impaired up to
readers for cell phones and game consoles. OpenDoc Society is supported
by a large number of organisations, including government bodies,
international corporations, educational, cultural and scientific
institutions and NGO's .  If you care about an open information society
and a transparent market, why don't you join?

                                More info: http://www.opendocsociety.org

About the quoted persons:

Bert Bakker (1958) is president of OpenDoc Society, other affiliations
include President of the Association for International Labor brokers
and the board of Mira Media, seeking diversity in the media. He is
employed as a senior advisor to international strategy consultants
Meines & Partners. From 1994 to 2006 he was a prominent member of the
Dutch House of Commons on behalf of D66 as their financial
spokesperson. In addition he was involved with economic affairs,
defense and media. He was chairman of the inquiry into the fall of
Yuguslavian enclave Srebrenica, which led to the fall of the Dutch
cabinet. Before he joined parliament he held a number of other
positions, including being a correspondent of the Universitaire Pers
(University Press) and head of administrative affairs and information
of the SER (Social and Economic Council). He became a well-known public
figure through his chairmanship of the inquiry that examined the
peacekeeping missions of the Dutch army.

Michiel A.G.J. Leenaars (1972) is vice-chair of OpenDoc Society. He is
Director of Strategy at NLnet foundation (a Netherlands based charity
investor in technology) and director of the Netherlands chapter of the
Internet Society (which has around 1000 members). Mr. Leenaars is
secretary of the board of Gridforum.nl (promoting grid computing and
cloud technology), board member of Bartimeus Accessibility (foundation
that promotes equal access to ICT for the disabled) and treasurer of
Petities.nl foundation (facilitating civil action through an
ICT-toolkit). In addition he is a policy advisor for the Netherlands
National Computing Facilities foundation, a subsidiary of the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). He has a
background in Physics at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and Arts at
Tilburg University in the Netherlands.