South Africa Adopts ODF as a Government Standard

ais523 writes "As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards (pdf) for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out)."

Comments

Re:Ironic

[ChameleonDave]

OK, I've just RTFA.

This is all relevant only for "Working Office Document formats". For final presentation, they're using PDF. For web pages, they're using HTML 4 or XHTML with testing in Firefox 2 and IE6, plus later versions. What is it with this tradition of inaccurate summaries on Slashdot?

Re:Ironic

[ianare]

FTFA :

He explained, however, that there was "space for pragmatism" in deciding on what formats to be used. He gave PDF as an example, which was not technically an open standard but did not have comparable open equivalents. He said that when faced with a choice of standards, the most open would be chosen. (emphasis mine) Sounds good to me, PDF is widely readable, and ODF is not the best format for distribution when you don't want the document to be altered. It would have been ironic if it was a .doc file.

Re:Ironic

[weighn]

that the link is a PDF? Opened the Document Properties in the perverse hope of seeing "Creator: Adobe InDesign". Alas, created with OO.org 2.2. Damn!

Re:Google Support for ODF

[FutureDomain]

You must have missed it. Google Docs supports ODF for documents and spreadsheets, but not presentations (only .ppt for now). In fact, they've supported it for a while (I exported a document to ODF back in May).

Re:Google Support for ODF

[Mike Morgan]

Yep, missed it. But the "Save as OpenDocument" is only available from the "Docs Home" page under "More actions". It's not available when you're editing the document from the File menu.

Thanks!

Re:Ironic

[z4pp4]

I'm currently doing some IT contract work for a South African Government department, and can see some flaws in this:

- The average user is not very educated in IT. If something *minor* changes, you will get a helpdesk call.
- The level of IT skills at this point in time is low. The major complement of IT staff at departments are contractors. Very little skills transfer is taking place to permanent staff, and they just mostly sit around and do nothing.
- Implementing change management will be an issue. The change needs to be across the board, which will decrease efficiency for at least 6 months, since Government does not plan ahead until it is too late. I see this effect in a current project where no cut-over period was catered for between and old system and a new system.
- Document formatting inside Government departments is *terrible*. I foresee that this will worsen the situation.

Aside from this, the Government has draft policy to go to open source. While I do not have anything against Open Source in a business environment, I foresee a lot of problems in this regard. Which, of course, is good for contractors :)

ODF reader plug-in for FireFox

[Anonymous Coward]

So ODFs would be better for viewing in Firefox? Seems to me they would be even slower, while waiting for OpenOffice to load.

Actually, viewing ODF in Firefox is quite fast. No need for any suite to load. Besides, the are other suites beyond OpenOffice. Koffice and Workplace are two readily available examples.