The ODF Alliance, which promotes the use of OpenDocument Format in governments, has just published its annual report for 2007. You can read the press release, which highlights some of the key developments of the year, here. The annual report itself is here. There’s no question that there is growing momentum behind the idea of open formats in government. The Alliance highlights as proof points decisions by the Netherlands, Norway, and South Africa to embrace ODF, increased applications support for ODF, progress on accessibility issues, and the growth of the alliance itself, which is now approaching 500 members (Novell is one) .
The OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, for which ODF is the default word processing file format, continues to be one of the great successes in open source. It’s got great features, it supports all the leading file formats, it runs on multiple platforms, and it’s easy to use (my 80-year old mother is a user). Oh yeah, and it’s free. What’s not to like?
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The Dutch government has decided that all central government bodies have to be able to process ODF-documents per 1st April 2008. Other government bodies will follow per 1st September 2008. The benefits of this decision are clear: less dependency on proprietary software and a solution to archiving issues.