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Friday, September 2, 2005
The state of Massachusetts unveiled plans to officially end use of the Microsoft Office suite, instead switching to an open document format currently implemented by many open-source groups. Massachusetts is believed to be the first major public-sector group to implement such a plan in the United States.
Target implementation date is January 1, 2007. The task is considered challenging, as most government documents were created in closed-source programs such as Office, Lotus Notes, and Corel WordPerfect.
OpenDocument is an XML-based standard for creating documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphs. The OpenDocument format is supported by many software suites, including OpenOffice and StarOffice. While Microsoft document formats are generally the most commonly used, government officials worried about the proprietary nature of the formats.
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This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.
Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.
Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.
The text of this article has been released into the public domain. In the event that this is not legally possible, this article may be used for any purpose, without any condition, unless such conditions are required by law. This applies worldwide. Copyright terms on images, however, may vary, so please check individual image pages prior to duplication.
