PR: MassGov Declares OpenDocument the Standard File Format for the Commonwealth

[ Thanks to Sam Hiser for this information. ]

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts 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, 2007
• 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, Peter Quinn, requests our comments on the document to Standards [at] state.ma.us by September 9, 2007.

Download xpdf

Draft Document

Related Stories:

• Groklaw: Microsoft Bends for the GPL to Qualify as Open Format in MA(Mar 25, 2005)
• LinuxPR: OpenOffice.org Announces Version 2.0 Public Beta (Mar 05, 2005)
• The Future Is Open: What OpenDocument Is And Why You Should Care(Feb 01, 2005)