Australia Mandates Microsoft's Office Open XML

littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions."

Comments

Public information should be open

[DeathElk]

As long as they provide information to the public in an open format such as HTML or PDF, I don't care what they adopt in an SOE.

The major beef I do have however, is the Windows only tax return software provided by the Australian Taxation Office. The fact that I have to use Windows if I want to file my tax return electronically is totally unacceptable.

Re:I keep seeing...

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

Not even MS Office is able to write OOXML as in ECMA-376:

Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.

(emphasis mine) [source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179190.aspx ]

Re:But people in the US should thank them....

[TheRaven64]

Actually, they are now required not to pay the Microsoft Tax. The last tests I saw showed that Microsoft Office got over 5,000 failures in Microsoft's own OOXML conformance tests. It therefore does not support OOXML and can therefore not be used by the Australian government. I suggest that anyone in Australia points this out to their elected representatives.

Amusingly, Microsoft Office actually did better in ODF conformance tests (with a plugin, I think), than it did in OOXML conformance tests. I'm not sure how OO.o does with OOXML, but it's managed to open both of the the OOXML files I've ever been sent.