MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice

kcurtis writes "According to a boston.com article, senators in Massachetts are questioning the move to OpenDocument." From the article: "At issue is how the state government stores the millions of digital documents and other public records it creates. The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages -- except Microsoft Office. The state Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee is holding a hearing Monday on the proposed document storage standards after blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns."

Comments

OpenWhat?

[debilo]

Headline: MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice
Submission: ...are questioning the move to OpenDocument.

You do realize OpenOffice != OpenDocument, Zonkyboy, don't you? And what the hell is a Massachetts?

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[arkanes]

You would be wrong. Access in particular has absolutely shitty backwards compatability - we're currently in the middle of a huge effort at work to upgrade from Access 97. If you even *open* an Access 97 db from Access 2000, it can't be accessed from 97 anymore (which is why we never did a full migration before). Access 2003 can't open 97 databases at all, and Access 2003 refuses (or at least corp. IT can't figure out how) to co-exist with 97 on the same machine the way 2000 can.

Complex Word documents often have layout/macro issues - pretty much the same level of compatability as the OSS filters, really - though the conversion is very good and the fast majority of users will see no problems, just as with OO imports.

I think it's pretty clear to everyone that this is MS pulling out its political guns - think we'd be having these sort of hearings if they were moving servers from UNIX or Linux to Windows? The accessibility issue is real, and I'm not disabled and haven't done an intensive study, but OO.o does have accessibility support, even if it's not as good as what Office has. Previous versions of Office (97 and the like) have worse accessibility, so if they were good enough for workers then OO.o should be too, especially if funding can be found to sponser accessibility work in OO.o. The quotes don't sound to me like any has actually reviewed the alternatives and is familiar with the level of support in OO.o. It's not 100% correct, either. Makers of screen reader software and braille readers have specifically supported Office at the expense of other applications - an example of the harm the Office monopoly causes - and screen magnifiers work with whatever software you use. I think we're seeing a lot of people with vested political interests, or even just people that MS and MS backers have political access to, trying to toss thier 2 cents in to break a project that means a signifigant loss of revenue for MS.

All of this wouldn't matter in the slightest is MS implemented support for OpenDocument, of course, and I imagine there are plenty of people in Massechusets who would simply jump all over the chance to give MS 3 times the money they'd otherwise spend.

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that anybody recommending doing anything in Access should be shot, stabbing, burned, mutilated, killed, and have their body jumped upon by 10000 screaming monkeys... but that's only a personal observation of course.

8 years of backward compatability....

[OSgod]

Is your requirement? Most stuff I deal with won't come close to that except for rudimentary support at best. After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry with 5 years being a good company/product to deal with.

Re:8 years of backward compatability....

[greginnj]

Why should there be a necessary expiring of information, anyway? Can you imagine if every bit of information from more than 80 years ago suddenly disappeared? Imagine what we'd lose.

Hear, hear! I'm reminded of TFA of a day or two ago about resistance to Black Death conferring resistance to HIV. Public records (birth and death) over 400 years old were used to establish family trees of BD survivors who stayed in the community and had descendants still in the community. Without those accessible public records, this medical research would have been impossible. This is exactly what MA is trying to avoid.

Anyone want to bet that MS will still be supporting Word 2003 file format for even 10% of that amount of time?

Thought not.

Re:8 years of backward compatability....

[Anonymous Coward]

Never worked in the pharmaceuticals industry have you? There you have 10+ year product development cycles, and FDA mandated document requirements throughout.

Re:8 years of backward compatability....

[mysticgoat]

Point One: wrt to archival access, the "standard of the industry" and good corporate practices do not apply to some institutions, such as governments.

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was ratified in 1780; it is of course still in active use. There is a large body of documents written before 1780 that might be called up on any discussion of MA law or procedure, as well as a yearly addition to this that has grown exponentially. This is not just the legislative and judicial records; it includes agency policy memos and even invoices and purchase orders since these might indicate how MA actually did its daily work at any time.

This is a "living archive" situation-- any of these old documents of the last 300 years could become relevant again today in a variety of different settings ranging from courtroom fights over MA's stewardship of public lands to the responsibilities that anyone selling goods or services to MA residents must meet.

I agree with the current govenrment of MA that it is important to make these materials as accessable as possible for as long as MA continues to exist. And it makes sense to look for the most efficient way to do this-- which in the eyes of those who have assessed the numerous studies, means moving to OpenDocument.

Point Two: Some other institutions have similar needs. Hospitals are one example that I know fairly well.

Malpractice litigation is one of a hospital's biggest expenses. In its collective wisdom, US courts have determined that a hospital should not be held to today's standard of care for an incident that happened years ago; the hospital should be held to the standard of care that existed at the the time of the incident. It is the hospital's responsibility to prove what its standard of care at that time was, and whether it exercised due diligence in developing and enforcing that standard. That means that all old policy and procedure statements, the research that informed these decisions, attendance records for training sessions in the new procedures, and some indication of compliance with the changed standard, all need to be part of a living archive. Obviously storing all this material digitally has advantages over paper storage. Just as clearly, it makes sense to go to a format that promises easy access into the future.

I worked for a hospital when MS Office 2000 was released. Our IT department thought this was a big deal when the first machines came in, and handed them out like candy to the Most Very Important Persons. IT got slapped hard alongside the head when the hospital Administrator found that the memo he had written on his new computer looked like crap on the computers of the clinical staff who were still using Office 97. IT got slapped hard again, when a Quality Control nurse found that MS Office 2000 mangled old policy statements that had been written in Word 97 and made them unusable. In the end, IT had to go through the expense of ripping out MS Office 2000 on every newly purchased machine, and replacing it with MS Office 97, and living in an uncomfortably ambiguous legal situation since Microsoft wouldn't give a straight answer to whether such a change was actually covered under the blanket contract. Instead of being acclaimed as the white knight heroes that the IT staff thought would be their due, the whole department acquired an odor reminiscent of the unclean shoes of a swineherd.

If there is a moral to this longish Sunday morning writing exercise, it is that youngsters who are entering the IT professions need to keep an eye on issues of long term storage and broad access.

StarOffice Is Accessable

[shibashaba]

Sun added many accessability features to StarOffice, including support for blind users a while back:

http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/7/acce ssibility/index.xml

Hopefully someone decides to talk to Sun and ask them if StarOffice has these types of features before their meeting.

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[j-pimp]

Ok except consider the following: If your developing for Windows, the JetSQLengine will be built in. For small databases that will always run on windows, Access is good enough. Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe, or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external dependencies. If you have to extend any product that stores its data in something ODBC accessiable, you can do a linked table in MS ACCESS and store all your data in your own database. I keep all the SQL for my access queries in version control with my code. When ever possible I try to wean my clients onto MySQL/PHP web apps. When I'm interfacing with a third party program I try to eventually rewrite said app or get a cleaner interface to it than access.

Re:We already have Section 508

[morgan_greywolf]

Accessibility for OpenOffice.org on Windows is provided via the Java Access Bridge. So any screen readers, etc., on Windows would need to use that API. On Linux, OOo is compliant with the GNOME Accessibility API and therefore is supported by the Gnopernicusscreen reader app.

See this page for details.

Don't be ashamed...

[BerntB]

It is the same all over the world, just more hidden in other countries. Let me give an example from Sweden, which is among the top "corruption free" countries in the world. I argue it is as bad here as in many other countries -- the difference is that the politicians are more group oriented, since the parties are harder knit together. The collective leadership makes it harder to do more that get a low price on the summer house or fix good jobs for friends and relatives.

There was an oligopoly on food distribution for decades, with much higher prices than south, in the EU. One of the two big chains even had their own exception from monopoly laws! This was officially complained about by the politicians (but not too loudly), but nothing ever happened.

Despite that food costs is a larger part of low income people's expenses, something claimed to be close to the heart of the usual government party.

A few years after joining the EU, a low-price German food distribution chain started to open shops. They had a really hard time to get permits, since the towns decided that they wouldn't allow any more business centers outside the central cities (despite that those have been built for decades!). The central politicial parties didn't exactly intervene on the local political agenda, either.

All the bad press that the German shop got is besides the point -- we are talking about state/country level politicians here. (Swedish press isn't exactly NY Times in integrity.)

Sure, it might just be total incompetence. But since this hit low income people disproportionally, left wing politicians, always talking about the poor man's lot and "solidarity", should at least have talked seriously about doing something in the 70s.

I don't know if/what kind of lobbying was behind all this. I just note that 10% of the total cost for food in a year is a lot of money. And that left wingers love talking about the evil corporations, but never mention the big distribution companies that really stole the poor people's money.

IMHO, the win with the EU membership, is serious laws against monopolies.

Re:Don't sign

[oldosadmin]

You are partially correct. The group I represent, the OpenDocument Fellowship, promotes open formats, not open source. However, the level playing field created by open formats helps all software companies, and open source developers, to compete more fairly.

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[Taladar]

Sadly with access you lose more work-time minute for minute while waiting for the slow database than you save when writing the frontend. A few years back the IT department where I worked used Access to store their PC database (who is the user of which PC and where is that PC located, which Hardware is in that PC,...). You often had to wait minutes to get the page for a single PC from the Access Database with a few thousand (below 10000) PCs when you accessed it through their 6 MBit/s Link across town. I don't think any Open source database would have been that slow.

A few links

[Anonymous Coward]

blinux
"emacspeak the complete audio desktop"
Orca
"Sun's StarOffice 8 (based on OpenOffice.org) was released earlier today. In fact, already one University campus has standardized on it! There are many new features, including improvements to Microsoft Office compatibility, support for the new OASIS OpenDocument format (which the State of Massachusettes is adopting - see pages 18-19 of the Massachusettes Enterprise Information Technology Architecture version 3.5 [available in OpenDocument format too of course]), support for the W3C XForms standard, and new migration tools to help convert the Visual Basic macros in MS Word and Excel documents to StarOffice Basic."

But the new features I most want to highlight are the accessibility enhancements. To my mind, the key accessibility improvements in StarOffice 8 (and the shortly-to-be-released OpenOffice.org 2.0) are:

      1. Dramatic improvements in desktop theme support. StarOffice 8 (and OpenOffice.org 2.0) now do an excellent job of conforming to things like the High Contrast theme in MS-Windows, or the High-Contrast-Large-Print theme in the GNOME desktop on Solaris and GNU/Linux systems.

      2. Numerous improvements to PDF export support. StarOffice 8 now supports Tagged PDF documents. Tags in PDF files are how the new Adobe Reader 7 exposes all of the accessibility information to assistive technologies and via it's own "self-reading" functionality.

      3. The usual collection of accessibility bug fixes (including one that allows Gnopernicus to properly read spreadsheet cells).

You can get a copy of StarOffice 8 right now for Windows, Linux, Solaris x86 or Solaris SPARC; in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, or Swedish!

It's nice to that at the same time that StarOffice accessibility improves, acceptance and adoption of StarOffice goes up. Some might question an implied cause and effect relationship between those two facts, but I'm content to know we're clearly on the right track in both of these areas. (2005-09-27 13:55:00.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Plenty more at Google where I found these if your interested. Interesting reading, maybe some of you will even find something you want to contribute to. Considering it regards Americans with disablities, you might even be able to get a grant to do some of the work.

Re:Microsoft, thanx for raising an important point

[zander]

• PERFECT OPPORTUNITY TO DEMONSTRATE WHY F/OSS IS THE RIGHT CHOICE.

I agree; and I have seen a flurry of activity around KOffice, including a cool screenshot for better accessibility in the upcoming release. See this page; KOffice preview

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[Ucklak]

How true, how true.

Seriously, and I've done it--

Most businesses have use an Access database in the past because it is fairly easy to start it and build on top of it. Hell, I've had one that grew past it's 1Gig limit (when we migrated it to SQL7 with the same front end).

Personally, I've found that if you build the frontend in an HTML interface and use PHP/MySQL as the backend, you have a much better chance of being accessible and don't have to worry about updrages with the Access front end.
My case had Mac users and where the remotes were using Terminal server, now they can login to a website and make updates.

Visual Bullshit

[Carcass666]

1. Most screen readers and such work within the Windows environment, not just Microsoft Word. If the concern is that keyboard shortcuts or accessibility features won't work, these things are easily adapted to OpenOffice 2. The idea that government documents are designed for accessibility is absurd. Anytime you hit embedded tables (or worse, nested tables), columns, etc., it is that much harder for screen magnifiers/screen readers to deal with. Which is why... 3. An open document format is actually better for people with visual disabilities because custom document readers can be created that are more friendly to screen readers and magnifiers.

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[ckedge]

> Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe,
> or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external
> dependencies.

Hee hee hee, until the person/persons* who are developing the GUI use a feature or three that are all in external DLLs that just happen to be in their environment, and then BANG, you find yourself hunting down these other DLLs that aren't documented but for which access complains it needs to function for your database queries.

(*) Person is typically management, and once they've put in functionality and come to depend on it, no way in hell can you rip it out.

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[quantum bit]

You would be wrong. Access in particular has absolutely shitty backwards compatability - we're currently in the middle of a huge effort at work to upgrade from Access 97. If you even *open* an Access 97 db from Access 2000, it can't be accessed from 97 anymore (which is why we never did a full migration before). Access 2003 can't open 97 databases at all, and Access 2003 refuses (or at least corp. IT can't figure out how) to co-exist with 97 on the same machine the way 2000 can.

Just a tip that may help out a little here. Although Access 2000+ won't let you directly manipulate Access 97 databases without converting them, the Jet DB engine is perfectly capable of R/W access to 97-format databases. One way to have them co-exist is to create a blank database in 2000, then link all the tables from the 97 format database in. By opening the special compatibility database, Access 2000 users can have full read-write capability without having to convert the database.

You can also go the other way (open 2000 format MDBs in 97) if you have a new enough MDAC version installed. A simple linked table won't work, but you can route it through an ODBC data source.

It's an ugly hack, and you still have to manually copy over reports / macros, but it works.

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[quantum bit]

How true. I recently migrated an Access DB with only a few hundred thousand records to PostgreSQL. We haven't even optimized the queries yet (just linked tables to the PG backend) and the weekly reports are already 10x faster. And this is over a gigabit LAN -- I'd hate to think of how slow it would be from one of the frame relay sites.

Access sucks. Use SQLite instead

[Dr. Zowie]

SQLite is lighting fast, tiny, and public domain. No external dependencies required. It also supports a pretty full-featured SQL (maybe not so "Lite" anymore, except for its small footprint in RAM)

Re:I am impressed

[Antiocheian]

This is a response to both NickFortune's posting http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166793&cid=139 08964 and Arkane's http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166793&cid=139 08733

I am impressed too that you've already got mod points for being "insightful" while you both insist on a fallacious argument without any real data or experience on the topic: "it wasn't a matter that much concerned me at the time" and "Can you list the accessiblity features Office 95?".

Very well then. Here is a summary the accessibility support between Microsoft Word 6 (that is Office 4.3, not even Office 95!!!) and OpenOffice Writer.

• Microsoft Word 6 accessibility items not found in OpenOffice.org:
  • Enlarging toolbar buttons
  • Lets you map commands to any key combination
  • With the addition of Microsoft's Access Pack (downloadable from various BBSes, contact details provided on Word's help files) the user gains these additional benefits:
  • Allow single-finger typing of SHIFT, CTRL, and ALT key combinations.
  • Ignore accidental keystrokes.
  • Adjust the rate at which a character is repeated when you hold down a key, or turn off character repeating entirely.
  • Prevent extra characters if you unintentionally press a key more than once.
  • Enable you to control the mouse cursor by using the keyboard.
  • Enable you to control the computer keyboard and mouse by using an alternate input device.
  • Provide a visual cue when the computer beeps or makes sounds.
• Microsoft services for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, not found in OpenOffice.org:
  • Through a text telephone (TT/TDD) service, Microsoft provides people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing with complete access to Microsoft product and customer services. You can contact Microsoft Sales and Service on a text telephone by dialing (800) 892-5234 between blah blah. For technical assistance you can contact Microsoft Product Support Services on a text telephone at (206) 635-4948 blah blah.
  • Microsoft software documentation on audio cassettes
  • Provides additional information on customizing Windows 3 for people with disabilities
• Additional information on products for people who are blind or have low vision
  • Besides the phone numbers provided above, information is being provided on academic research such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison producing a book and a compact disc which describe products that help people with disabilities use computers. One full page of such information is provided

Now. Can you name me a SINGLE option in OpenOffice.org which is not provided by the operating system and is useful to people with disabilities? Can you also name me a single paragraph for information or support for people with disabilities? A phone number perhaps? Aural help?

Nick I am not going to participate in your Usenetesque style of response. Remove the fluffy "Let's be charitable here" irony and your posting is thin air.

Arkanes, is there "much of a reason" to pay attention to YOU anymore?

Mods, perhaps you should be more careful in your ratings.

Re:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[kimvette]

[blockquote]Not to mention the fact that in the Linux world, nothing comes close to Access as a [programmable] frontend.[/quote]

OpenOffice.org Base is the OOo equivalent of Access, and what's more, linking to external data sources is far easier (for the average user) in OpenOffice.org than it is in Microsoft Office.

Base supports ODBC, forms, basic, and everything else you'd expect from a desktop database platform. What more do you need? Or, are you basing your argument on data that is a year or more old, before Base was introduced (e.g., OOo 1.2.x)? Your statement would have been 100% accurate 18 months ago, fairly accurate 12 months ago when OOo 1.9.xx/2.0 was not ready for use, and totally untrue six months ago, let alone now.