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

Naming of OOXML a really dirty trick by MS

[mmj638]

Sneaking the word "Open" into this specification was a really dirty trick by Microsoft because

- it implies that this standard is somewhat "open", and the word "open" has positive connotations
- it (seemingly deliberately) creates confusion with "Open Office" ie the product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.

I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people were taken in by this, thinking that by making the decision to support OOXML they were somehow contributing to more "openness" in the sense of open government and/or open source.

Re:Compression must default to .zip

[SanityInAnarchy]

The nice thing about .zip is that it is, in fact, supported everywhere, out of the box.

It's also nice in that it actually supports directory trees. The legacy lzma, and the newer xz, well, don't. I like tar in principle, and I use these formats for all sorts of things that I don't have to share with others, but there are definitely cases where zip is nice -- where it's nice to be able to effectively "mount" a zipfile, "seek" to an appropriate file within it, and read it, without having to decompress the whole thing. This is why zip is used by tons of games, where they might not even be using compression, but they can't trust most filesystems to handle that many small files properly. It's why it's used by both OpenDocument and MS OOXML -- it's the easiest way imaginable to embed multiple files into a single document, including multiple XML files that are compressed well.

It also depends what your goals are. Zip compresses and decompresses a hell of a lot faster than lzma. These days, I standardize on either lzop for speed or xz for compression ratio, but zip and gzip are nice compromises.

Active Directory Rights Management Services

[blarkon]

Built into Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is a role called "Active Directory Rights Management Services". It allows authors to control what can be done with documents. You can stop cutting, pasting, forwarding, editing, the whole shebang. Office 2007 and 2010 follow the rules set down in the rights templates. So does the operating system.

After Wikileaks, governments are going to be all about rights management protection for documents. RMS stops people opening sensitive documents that they've copied to a USB stick.

Open / Libre Office doesn't have this functionality (and because of the Open Source movement's philosophical objection to rights management technologies probably will never have this functionality).

The recent wikileaks saga has been a big wake up call to business and government - because they want to do their best to make sure that their information isn't plastered all over the Internet. Office 2007 / 2010 support this out of the box (just that few people use it). Open / Libre Office won't support it in a million years because "DRMs is Teh Evil"