OpenOffice.org and the State of Massachusetts
- What is the problem?
- The better is the enemy of the good
- Electronic documents age, because file formats loose support
- Valuable data turns into digital bit soup.
- What is not a solution?
- Backup and coping of media alone
- Keeping old versions of applications around
- Old application does not run on new OS
- Old OS does not run on new hardware/printer/...
- What is the solution?
- The State of Massachusetts says:
- Open document formats that are free to be used by programs
- Preferably open source applications, because a format specification is only a fraction of the value of a running application in source. (porting is less work than implementing to read and convert(?) an old format).
- What does it mean for the State?
- New ETRM 3.5 mandates beginning of 2007 all new documents are stored in PDF or ODF
- Old documents are converted as much as possible
- Practical consequence support for ODF for Office applications
- MS refuses to support ODF
- OASIS works on MS Office plug-ins back to Office 97 to read and write ODF. Testing by the state in progress.
- Open source office suites, such as OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, ...
- Also supporting are Lotus Notes, IBM ...
- What does it mean for the citizens of Massachusetts
- The good news is their state documents are future proof
- The not so bad news is they might get documents in ODF and need the means to process them (OASIS PlugIn for MS or OpenOffice.org, etc.)
- What does it mean for the average geek?
- What file formats do you store data in, you want to keep?
- Personal Wiki?
- Photos, Images?
- E-Mail (Contacts!)
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Some OpenOffice.org Trivia: