Australian Government Denies Microsoft Bias In OOXML Choice

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the Australian Government is not taking criticism of its decision to mandate Microsoft's Office Open XML standard lying down. 'The policy is vendor-neutral which allows its principles and standards to be used across any platform,' they said this week. Yup ... except for the fact that almost no other office suite apart from Microsoft Office supports writing to the standard. And as for Firefox? Turns out 96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer. Looks like bureaucracy is winning here."

Comments

I want to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be a conspiracy!

Re:I want to believe

[dwarfsoft]

96% of desktops use IE6 and thats because most users are blocked from installing their own apps. Upgrades to IE are rare due to this breaking old web code that they rely on. This is less malice or conspiracy and more stagnancy than anything else.

Re:I want to believe

[mjwx]

96% of desktops use IE6 and thats because most users are blocked from installing their own apps. Upgrades to IE are rare due to this breaking old web code that they rely on. This is less malice or conspiracy and more stagnancy than anything else.

That and retraining government employees is incredibly difficult.

Ironic seeing as in the DPS (Dreaded Private Sector) workers love free training as we can ask for more money, get a free lunch and a 3-5 day semi-holiday (when was the last training session you had that went past 4 PM).

Re:I want to believe

[crafty.munchkin]

Chris is right, at the government department I just left, installing apps wasn't an option, but we did at least provide firefox and IEtab for the users. but even still, most of them used IE anyway, due to compatibility with external department's websites. the grapevine has told me that the department is going to be moving all servers away from Novell SLES10/11 and OES2 to Microsoft software in a cost-reduction exercise... looks like I got out just in time!

Re:I want to believe

[dwarfsoft]

I just bailed from one that said the same... but they have been saying that for years. The projects never deliver. The fact that the "new upgraded systems" to replace these outdated websites are still stuck in the same project loops that plague the public sector means government workers are left using outdated software to access outdated systems.

Re:I want to believe

[dwarfsoft]

When I was in the Public Sector I LOVED training... it meant going out of town, getting paid accommodation, meal allowance, party nights, and general fun (mind you, we did have good funding for our department)

In the Private Sector you only get training if you jump up and down and make yourself loud enough. Training gets sparingly allocated because private organisations like to hoard their monies wherever they can.

Re:I want to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic seeing as in the DPS (Dreaded Private Sector) workers love free training as we can ask for more money, get a free lunch and a 3-5 day semi-holiday (when was the last training session you had that went past 4 PM).

Sort of like the public sector. Or at least when I worked in it. I never actually had an employer since make good on the training offer. Which is really shitty, because I never really did have the flexibility in the private sector that I had in the public sector either.

(In australia, where this story is about).

I'd love to go back to public, the cut-throat dog eats dog nonsense that makes up private sector life gets me down sometimes. Could do without the bureacracy of govt and large companies though, but I guess its part of the tradeoff.

Re:I want to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear ya man. I worked at uni that went from an awesomely diverse mix of mac, pcs, linux & unix desktops to a nearly total microsoft takeover. What orgs like microsoft , dell, oracle & cisco tend to do is force universities to sign exclusivity contracts that stop them from making purchases from competitors. I mean sure cisco stuff is great, but when we want to just stick a 4 port in the photocopier room to make a little room for an extra terminal, it sucks having the dept told we cant spend $80 on a little d-link switch and instead had to blow hundreds on some overpriced cisco thing that was far overspecced for our needs because some prick in a suit and no idea of the implications signed an exclusivity contract. Even worse when our old 3COM router rack was forced to be dismantled and replaced with a hideously expensive cisco thing because the compliance officer took a shit when he discovered the perfectly reliable rack of unix+3com gear.

I felt really bad for the physics + chem guys who where getting denied unix workstations to run software that could ONLY run on unix because of these deals. I know at one point the dept actually threatened to unplug from the network and get a private fibre link to completely dissociate themselves from the university. Watching lawyers INTERNALLY battle is bizzare.

And yeah, we knew it was all over when our beautifully functional Solaris mail servers where replaced with exchange crap , requiring a grand total of 2x solaris servers servicing 10K+ students perfectly with a rack of about 10 exchange servers that NEVER where able to cope with the load. What a waste of good money.

And yeah, I knew my time was up when I was told my beloved Netware servers time was up. Good night sweet prince and hello private industry. Not sure I made the right decision though.

Re:I want to believe

[crafty.munchkin]

Ironic seeing as in the DPS (Dreaded Private Sector) workers love free training as we can ask for more money, get a free lunch and a 3-5 day semi-holiday (when was the last training session you had that went past 4 PM).

I've never had a private sector employer send me on a training course, or even reimburse me for one i've sent myself on. And on the note of training sessions going past 4pm, the Novell, VMware and EMC courses I've been on over the last 4 years have all gone past 5pm on several days.

Re:I want to believe

[DeathElk]

UniNSW by any chance?

Re:I want to believe

[mjwx]

I've never had a private sector employer send me on a training course, or even reimburse me for one i've sent myself on. And on the note of training sessions going past 4pm, the Novell, VMware and EMC courses I've been on over the last 4 years have all gone past 5pm on several days.

Either you and the AC are unlucky or I'm quite lucky.

Three out of three IT employers in the last 5 years have sent me on training courses. Especially vendor training that lets the company get special deals. Software dev houses love to push their staff into MCP's in my experience, hardware vendors push for resellers to have staff indoctrinated^W trained in their products.

Never been on a Novell or EMC course, but MS, Red Hat and Vmware always went 9-4 unless you were having trouble, any competent training provider will always add extra time in for students who struggle.

Re:I want to believe

[mjwx]

In the Private Sector you only get training if you jump up and down and make yourself loud enough. Training gets sparingly allocated because private organisations like to hoard their monies wherever they can.

Not in IT, well most IT orgs in OZ, the trick is to get in before the training budget is used up. If your own company provides the training it's even easier. I've been on a few training courses that had nothing to do with sys/net admin simply because I asked and we ran the courses ourselves.

Re:I want to believe

[Cwix]

People need training to use firefox?

Re:I want to believe

[dwarfsoft]

Well, I recently moved to a large multi-national. So I am awaiting to see what training perks I can get in a Large Private Sector company. I've worked in small and medium sized companies before as well as large government depts, so I've spoken from those experiences.

Re:I want to believe

[aussie_a]

Three out of three IT employers in the last 5 years have sent me on training courses

Fat lot of good it did them. They trained you up and then you left shortly afterwards.

Re:I want to believe

[anomaly256]

Time and again I've come up against the same thing. And every time I either say 'No' or 'Goodbye'. Watching the chaos when a large AD deployment gets munged and domain controllers start refusing to sync with each other, or exchange hits some arbitrary artificial limit that some dick thought was a good default that's impossible to change without a 8000 character powershell oneliner, or a mandatory microsoft security update fucks the tcp stack on a headless machine requiring a rollback or total removal-then-reinstall of the network drivers in a colo you can't get to, I've vowed never to administer microsoft shit ever again, no matter what they want to pay me to do it. The price to my health from dealing with users screaming all day (not to mention the self loathing that comes from knowing you put up with perfectly functioning and reliable setups being replaced by this shit) isn't justified by *any* paycheque. Never regretted leaving those places. And last I heard every single one of them have either gone bust when their customers got sick of services dying all the time and then being constantly charged for techs to fix things and the only knowledgeable techs leaving like rats from a sinking ship, or are currently in litigation because of introducing those things by switching to microsoft and will go bust very soon. There's a reason microsoft is struggling right now and it's a real shame because they do have *some* good things. Windows 7 is actually pretty sweet in my opinion. C# is a fun language and the latest visual studio still beats eclipse, monodevelop and netbeans hands-down (for the languages it supports at least). But SBS? Exchange? Sharepoint? IIS? No damn way. We really need businesses to get past this brain-damaged notion that Microsoft's niche is the enterprise.

Re:I want to believe

[TapeCutter]

Training is popular in Oz because of the "training guarantee" law enacted by the Hawke govternment a couple of decades ago. The law stipulates that companies over a certain size must provide a certain level of training for employee's. Failing to comply incures a levy in the form of additional taxes. The training can be in-house and on any subject, so most large corporations run in-house training courses that are often, (but not always), little more than a tax dodge. The training budget usually runs out as soon as the company has met it's training guarantee requirements.

Re:I want to believe

[RagingMaxx]

My thoughts EXACTLY! K17 will never be the same...

Re:I want to believe

[Eskarel]

Netware's time is up because Novell haven't done shit all with it for 10 years and now they're gone. It's done, for better or worse. OES was a nice try, but it was far too little and far too late.

Re:I want to believe

[Eskarel]

Sharepoint is a PITA, but I've used some of it's competitors and they're worse.

Re:I want to believe

[marcosdumay]

Sharepoint solves the wrong problem, but MS marketing makes people trink they want that problem solved. So we get at the worst possible situation, where we get a worse than useless software that is actualy well done (if you don't look to the backend), and your manager wants it. You can't tell him he shouldn't want it, and you can't tell him any competitor is better.

On a related point, have anybody ever seen a sucessfull Exchange deployment?

Re:I want to believe

[popoutman]

Sounds quite like the University of Limerick, Ireland. Back in the day, the network was "upgraded" to WinNT 4.0 about 6 months before it went retail gold. Since then things have been going downhill.... Exchange was now the default mailserver, it crapped out regularly and failed about fortnightly. There were fun with the ability to run rules on public folders, allowing the generation of two folders for a new post in one and then putting the new rules on those folders. It takes about 10 minutes for the exponential fodler creation to kill the server. There were another few snafu's there, but things appear to be realtively calm these days..

Re:I want to believe

[lavagolemking]

I'm surprised they didn't just outsource their e-mail to Microsoft in return for a few little perks, as many colleges seem to be doing. https://www.microsoft.com/education/solutions/liveedu.aspx

Re:I want to believe

[jc42]

96% of desktops use IE6 and thats because most users are blocked from installing their own apps. Upgrades to IE are rare due to this breaking old web code that they rely on. This is less malice or conspiracy and more stagnancy than anything else.

That and retraining government employees is incredibly difficult.

Oh, I dunno about that. For some years, my wife and I have played a game of asking people we meet what computer stuff they use at work, and at home. Almost always they'll tell us that at work they have to use Microsoft stuff, Windows and IE and so on. Then they'll say that at home they have a nice Mac (or two or three), and use both Safari and Firefox for browsing.

This seems especially true in government agencies, though my wife works in medical data processing, and she says it's almost universal there, too. So the conclusion would be that not only are all these workers quite capable of being retrained; they have all retrained themselves without prompting from their employers. Regardless of what they use at work, they prefer to spend their own money on computer systems that are actually friendly and easy to use (and don't constantly get bogged down with malware).

It's likely that the real explanation is just "corporate culture" (which includes government). In both the corporate and government worlds, top management rarely if ever actually touches computers themselves, and is generally abysmally ignorant of things like usability issues. Software compatibility is a poorly-understood geek concept that mostly functions to justify never moving to better software. That culture has long made its computer-related decisions by simply buying from IBM (of which Microsoft is a division, right? ;-) In management circles, "computer" and "IBM machine" have long been synonyms, and everything else is just a toy that no professional manager would bother investigating.

I've heard many cynical comments along these lines from lots of government workers, as well as in the corporate world. I'd conclude that all the talk of difficulty in retraining is simply a red herring. The "workers" are mostly smart enough to handle new computer systems, and this can be verified by asking what they use at home. So blaming their stupidity for the problems is just a coverup for the poor management at the top.

Here in the US, Microsoft has been one of the top "campaign contributors" for more than a decade now. That's probably the main explanation for the pressure inside government to standardize on Microsoft products. Does anyone have numbers on this in Australia?

Re:I want to believe

[Ancantus]

The college I work at is similar to this, I don't know the full political infighting going on, I try to keep my nose out of all of that. Main campus is using Exchange servers that break down every other day and replaced all the Windows 7 workstations with thin clients horribly installed and never truly tested before implementation. The engineering campus run under a totally separate IT department. We have our own Solaris mail servers; Linux, Unix and Windows workstations; and everything works just fine.

Re:I want to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

In most cases, it is rarely the end user that needs the retraining. It is the lazy "IT admins" who've struggled for years to achieve some basic certificate in Windows desktop management who can't see beyond the wall of their little cube, they just use the poor end user as an excuse to cover up their own short sightedness, laziness and incompetence. The best thing to happen to IT in recent years has been the iPhone and iPad. All of the senior folks in most organisations want them, or have already gone out and got themselves one, or three. It's fun seeing support staff squirm when they hear about the CxO getting an iPad and quickly realising that the Windows/IE only stuff they've been cobbling together over the years won't do.

Re:I want to believe

[Eskarel]

Sharepoint is about bundling different kinds of information in a meaningful way, like every other portal product. I've been doing portals for a few years now and they can actually be really useful. Sure there's a lot of rather pointless bells and whistles, but trying to do the same thing with file systems is a bloody disaster.

Re:I want to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

The law stipulates that companies over a certain size must provide a certain level of training for employee's.

Is there one on grammar? You should book right now.

Re:I want to believe

[Hognoxious]

It takes about 10 minutes for the exponential fodler creation to kill the server.

Hey, you used "exponential" correctly. We don't like that around here, stop it!

Re:I want to believe

[Douglas Goodall]

The author of netware was rightly proud of the fact that there were only a few hundred machine instructions between the wire and the disk. For a few years after Microsoft tried to enter the network server arena, their Lan Manager was considered a joke in comparison to NetWare. IMHO the reason MS overtook NetWare subsequently had to do with marketing muscle more than technical merits.

Re:I want to believe

[ancienthart]

mjwx, retraining government employees in Australia is incredibly difficult because it usually consists of getting 300+ people to sit in an auditorium and have administration talk at us about how important this is. My employer just did this to us recently and we as teachers got a bit talkative. Then another administrator got up and said "I'm tired of how we put these together and people show disrespect for talking - you wouldn't put up with this in one of your classes."
"Nooooo." I thought to myself "We'd bloody well give them a variety of activities to DO, rather than expecting them to sit still four three hours straight and listen to me blather."

I'd LOVE for a lab-based training session.

Re:I want to believe

[Vombatus]

Training is popular in Oz because of the "training guarantee" law enacted by the Hawke govternment a couple of decades ago.

The training guarantee rules went out the window some time ago. There is no longer a tax incentive to provide training for staff.

No bias at all.

[Opportunist]

The others could support the standard. Or they could eat cake.

What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it? Moreover, what kind of "openness" is it if the single vendor is also the issuer of the standard?

No bias, my gluteus maximus...

Re:No bias at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

WebM? A single vendor supports it and the FSF came out today in support of it.

Re:No bias at all.

[mrnobo1024]

You call this a "single vendor"?

Re:No bias at all.

[Jason Earl]

This just goes to show that open standards are not enough to provide for competition when it comes to software procurement. Microsoft has created a standard (of sorts) and it has even managed to ram it through the ISO. This does not, however, guarantee any actual interoperability. In point of fact there are precisely zero applications that implement the ISO standard. Even Microsoft fails in this regard.

Australia would have been better off to standardize on the old binary file formats. These are at least fairly well understood, and Microsoft is in no hurry to break backwards compatibility on these legacy formats.

WebM, on the other hand, is not really a standard at all. At beast it is a file format that Google hopes will become a de-facto standard. The difference, of course, is that Google does provide source code that will read and write the format. In the end this is clearly more useful in providing true interoperability. A year from now you probably won't be able to buy a device (with a screen anyway) that won't play WebM files, and some will probably record in the format as well. Meanwhile reading Word documents will still be the crapshoot that it is today. If you have the exact same version of the software, with the same fonts, and the same print driver you might (theoretically) get the same print output as the person that created the document.

Re:No bias at all.

[Tubal-Cain]

It's defined by a single entity, but it is being supported by by Google, Mozilla, ffmpeg, Opera, and more.

Re:No bias at all.

[cbope]

What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it?

Around here, it's called a Microsoft standard...

Re:No bias at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

"what kind of "openness" is it if the single vendor is also the issuer of the standard?"

==> Openness to security flaws \o/

Re:No bias at all.

[Pharmboy]

Well, you have Microsoft, and you have "Everyone else". In this instance, only "Everyone else" supports it.

Re:No bias at all.

[CODiNE]

Yes, but WHATEVER YOU DO. Do NOT apply that to Google and WebM.

Re:No bias at all.

[PeterBrett]

What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it?

Around here, it's called a Microsoft standard...

Sony have a quite a few of those, too. MiniDisc, DAT, ATRAC, Memory Stick, and UMD? So at least 5, off the top of my head.

Re:No bias at all.

[PeterBrett]

Yes, but WHATEVER YOU DO. Do NOT apply that to Google and WebM.

More than a single vendor supports WebM, so I don't see what the problem is. Oh wait -- you own an Apple device, don't you?

Re:No bias at all.

[marcosdumay]

Microsoft supports it too (at least, they promissed they will). It is just that they also support the competition. The only party not supporting WebM is Apple.

Re:No bias at all.

[Lorien_the_first_one]

Of course, only Microsoft software will reproduce each and every document with perfect fidelity.

Re:No bias at all.

[CODiNE]

Lots of support for it, but they had no say in it's design. It will be a de facto standard based on the size of Youtube. It remains to be seen how future WebM versions will be developed.

Re:No bias at all.

[Opportunist]

I'll apply that to anyone who creates an arbitrary format, pushes it through as a "standard" against all common sense and then uses its monetary muscle to "convince" organizations to embrace it as their new "standard".

In other news...

[Compaqt]

US Government denies Halliburton bias in mandating no-bid KBR contracts.

I suppose this explains why...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Assange was able to easily hack into the AUS gov's servers

Re:I suppose this explains why...

[mug funky]

the patch for that attack is due to be deployed in 3 months

How many implementations?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does any vendor properly implement the standard? Unless you have 2 vendors that do an honest attempt to implement it then I would say it isn't a viable standard.

Re:How many implementations?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does any vendor properly implement the standard? Unless you have 2 vendors that do an honest attempt to implement it then I would say it isn't a viable standard.

The standard is published, anyone can implement, the fact that they choose not to doesn't make it not a standard. FOSS, Open Source, Freedom...all that rhetoric... sounds more like 'it's only a standard if it's developed by our community, not if it's by someone we don't like'

Re:How many implementations?

[PeterBrett]

Does any vendor properly implement the standard? Unless you have 2 vendors that do an honest attempt to implement it then I would say it isn't a viable standard.

The standard is published, anyone can implement, the fact that they choose not to doesn't make it not a standard. FOSS, Open Source, Freedom...all that rhetoric... sounds more like 'it's only a standard if it's developed by our community, not if it's by someone we don't like'

Hmm. The problem is this: you have one standard which is relatively short, re-uses many other well-established standards for which there is existing code that can easily be plugged in, is clearly broken down into different levels of functionality, and for which there are already several pre-existing interoperable implementations for which you can get source code so you can see how it's done.

On the other hand, you have a second standard which extends to several thousand pages, defines its own incompatible versions of a bunch of stuff for which there are good pre-existing standards, exists under the shadow of a massive cloud of patents that are only licensed for you to use if you completely and accurately implement the specification, requires that you put deliberate bugs in your code to open many files, and for which there is no existing conformant implementation (and the single pre-standardisation implementation is closed-source anyway).

You are writing an open source program to generate nicely-formatted spreadsheet reports from a database. You have a finite amount of time. Which standard would you pick to implement first?

Standards

[Wolfling1]

The nice thing about Standards is that there are so many to choose from.

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if you are serious (MS supporter), or are pointing out the irony (non-MS supporter). Me? I wish there were more standards too. I mean, when I buy a DVD, there is only +R and -R. What about /R, *R, ==R, !=R? I want to use those standards too!

Re:Choice

[Anonymous Coward]

js3 in 1940: "If the German government wants to kill Jews, who are you to complain? Haven't other governments mandated non-killing of Jews? Let them do what they want."

Why should they change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Office works. The employees already know Microsoft Office. They are a western government, ie. not troubled financially, with technologically illiterate employees. Such organizations should stick with technology that works and is easy to transition to. Maybe a good, solid FOSS Office suite will emerge in several years, but for now, there is nothing that can beat Microsoft Office.

Re:Why should they change?

[Techman83]

Unfortunately that's not the case. Office 2007 requires significant pain for the end user and also doesn't support OOXML all that well. In face a 1.3mb template file is enough to cause 100% cpu load, where as libre office handles the same file without any issues. A number of our staff voluntarily use Libre Office and we deploy it on our rental equipment as we cant justify the license cost of MS Office to open the simple excel files our survey software generates.

Re:Why should they change?

[MightyMartian]

This isn't about the particular document creation software. It's about the notion that a clean room reimplementation of the document specs could be done without any knowledge of the originating software. This certainly can be done with ODF, because, though it is hardly perfect, has relatively straightforward specs.

OOXML, on the other hand, by even the most generous description, is a fucking mess. Yes, I'm sure sufficiently competent programmers could probably get the data and a good chunk of the formatting out of a docx file, the spec makes that quite difficult, and there are certainly cases, particularly since Microsoft has yet itself to create any software that in fact implements the ECMA version of OOXML.

No matter what way you cut it, from the basic position that adopting an open document standard should assure the ability to produce software to decode the document, years, even decades into the future, even if the original software is lost or no longer runs on any extant hardware, choosing OOXML over ODF is a sign of either intense stupidity on the part of the Australian government, or more likely that Microsoft and/or its Business Partners have had undue influence on the choosing of an open document standard. From a technical perspective, OOXML is a laughable joke.

Re:Why should they change?

[MightyMartian]

Sorry, meant ISO version, not ECMA version, but they're both crap. OOXML is a bad spec, so bad not even Microsoft implements it the way they have submitted it to any standards body.

Re:Why should they change?

[Tubal-Cain]

Microsoft 2007+ supports ODF (or so they say). Departments could continue pouring money down that particular hole if they wanted to, but the ones with tighter budgets could decide for themselves whether LibreOffice/OpenOffice or Calligra were good enough for their needs.

Re:Why should they change?

[man_of_mr_e]

I'm curious. How do you plan to create a clean-room implementation of an interoperable ODF using office suite when ODF doesn't specify things as important as how spreadsheet formulas are specified?

Re:Why should they change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very old FUD. Come back later. http://lwn.net/Articles/410387/

And yes it took time because there are different partener involved in the definition and they try to do it right (exactly the opposite of Microsoft OOXML qhich does have formula but with plenty of error found during the ISO process).

Re:Why should they change?

[PeterBrett]

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office-formula

Re:Why should they change?

[man_of_mr_e]

Great, and what part of that is mandated by ODF 1.1? You know, the only ratified standard version? What? You mean it's not? So someone can write an ODF compliant app without using this and using their own formula system? Yep, that's right.

Is OOo even compatible with OpenFormula?

Re:Why should they change?

[man_of_mr_e]

Thanks for admitting i'm right. The person I was responding to said "make a clean-room implementation", meaning they will use *NOTHING* but the specification. plug-fests are hacks in which people use de-facto standards to try and make themselves interoperable.

All you're doing is validating my point. Plug-fests should not be required to be interoperable.

Re:Why should they change?

[Anonymous Coward]

So ? It's a committee not a spec. GP is right, until Formula specification is finalized, ODF is useless for spreadsheets and OOXML remains the only open standard for this purpose.

Re:Why should they change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well except that OpenFormula is supposed to be specified in ODF 1.2, which still hasn't been standardized. So he is correct, there is currently no ODF standard that specifies something as simple as how to express formulas in a spreadsheet, EVEN TODAY. Sorry, but the world doesn't want to wait for your committee to agree on how to do something that's been around for the past 20 years.

Re:Why should they change?

[KingMotley]

http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/

Please point out the spec that defines how to do formulas. Oh? You can't find it? You know, you are right, it seems to be oddly missing. Now it's going to be real hard to make a clean room office suite with no standard on how to do formulas. I guess we can make a giant table where you can only type in numbers. We'll just leave out the more exotic things like adding, subtracting, summing, ranges, etc into a later version.

Re:Why should they change?

[bobaferret]

Someone should sue the Australian government is not complying with their new rules because they the documents they are producing in Word are not fully compliant with OOXML.

Re:Why should they change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, and what part of that is mandated by ODF 1.1? You know, the only ratified standard version? What? You mean it's not? So someone can write an ODF compliant app without using this and using their own formula system? Yep, that's right.

Is OOo even compatible with OpenFormula?

You ignore the following:

• The actual examples of formulas given in the ODF specification match the OpenOffice.org formula language.
• OpenFormula is essentially a standardized version of that same language.
• All vendors except for Microsoft support the OpenOffice.org formula language.
• OpenOffice.org is open source under the LGPL license, so anyone can could package the OOo formula language code into a library and use it directly in a commercial product.

So your argument doesn't hold water. Compared to implementing the rest of ODF, formula interoperability is trivial.

Re:Why should they change?

[man_of_mr_e]

And you are ignoring the following:

• OpenFormula is a draft standard, and it is not yet finished. Even if it were finished, it isn't an ISO standard either, so it would not be acceptable to organizations that require ISO standards
• ODF has been a standard for 5 years, ISO standard for 4. In that time, there wasn't (and still isn't) any ratified standard to describe spreadsheet formulas, thus no way to create interoperable documents using nothing but the standard.
• All vendors may support the OpenOffice.org formula language, but that doesn't help someone trying to implement the standard based only on the standard document. (as the original poster claimed you could do with ODF)
• If spreadsheet formulas are so trivial, why did ODF get finalized without them? And why has it taken > 6 years of work to get where OpenFormula is today when ODF itself only took 3?
• Using OpenOffice.org code is missing the point so badly, one would think you were purposely being dense. The OP was talking about clean room implementation, not to mention if you're going to include OOo code in your app, why write your app at all? Just use OOo.

How can you sit there and honestly claim OpenFormula is a valid solution today?

Regarding IE

[atomicbutterfly]

I work for a major Australian Government department. The summary comment about how "96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer" should not be a surprise to anyone - it's the mandated platform for nearly all corporations these days, at least here and in the US. If Firefox had some OFFICIAL support for things like Group Policies and MSI package deployment (and I'm not referring to those hacks and repackaged releases you can find at certain places on the net), then maybe there would be an increase in the level of corporate uptake of the browser. As an engineer and not a lowly secretary for example, I'm able to have both Firefox and IE on the same machine. Shit I can have nearly anything on my computer, so long as it's legal of course (thank goodness for open-source). There was a lot of tweaking to get Firefox to accept NTLM authentication which is normally passed through into IE automatically (hence a lot of poking about with the network.automatic-ntlm-auth.* settings in about:config), but it works quite well in the end except for some peculiar pages.

My point is that whoever wrote the summary has probably never worked in the IT department of a company which has to suppose thousands of desktops. There's a reason Active Directory and by extension Group Policy is so useful, and hence why IE is a standard on said desktops, and it ain't about bureaucracy. As for Microsoft's Open Office XML... well, we apparently use a TON of .doc files where a nice PDF would have been more appropriate, so a cultural shift to more open standards was never going to happen quickly anyway.

Re:Regarding IE

[Anonymous Coward]

bureaucracy is a large organization characterized by hierarchy, fixed rules, impersonal relationships, rigid adherence to procedures, and a highly specialized division of labor.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy

There's a reason Active Directory and by extension Group Policy is so useful, and hence why IE is a standard on said desktops, and it ain't about bureaucracy

Actually, it sounds like IE is a standard *precisely* because of bureaucracy, specifically because it is the easiest to browser to enforce/support a bureaucracy.

Re:Regarding IE

[domatic]

I've been managing Firefox through Active Directory for a couple of years now with FirefoxADM.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefoxadm/

It doesn't require a strange build of firefox. I manage proxy settings for the domain with the ADM templates and update Firefox on the clients with standard mozilla.com builds of Firefox. I don't know if it is OFFICIAL enough for you but it has proven effective here in letting Firefox work just as transparently as IE with AD and our proxies.

Re:Regarding IE

[atomicbutterfly]

Actually, it sounds like IE is a standard *precisely* because of bureaucracy, specifically because it is the easiest to browser to enforce/support a bureaucracy.

Fair point. I was mostly addressing the attitude presented in the summary that the decision to stick with IE was less for technical reasons and more because of Governmental stubbornness. The latter probably does still have something to do with it, but I doubt it's the main reason, and expending the share of IE to any alternative browser shouldn't be that surprising especially in a western Government.

Re:Regarding IE

[atomicbutterfly]

Looks nice, but it would never pass muster with those who set IT policy unfortunately. From the looks of it, it doesn't seem to be an officially authorized, Mozilla-endorsed set of templates for which Mozilla themselves can be held responsible if something fucks up (no need to mention the fallacy of believing this means anything in practice of course, but the lawmakers like to know they can shift the blame to someone). I imagine the software probably works quite well, however the 3rd-party nature of it is still a strike against it.

In the end, it's also yet another thing IT need to support which won't have a measurable improvement over something that's already built into the system, integrated and updated using pre-existing infrastructure with a very large amount of knowledgebase to fall back on. Governments are rather boring to work with when it comes to IT. :)

Re:Regarding IE

[Techman83]

Indeed there is aFirefox MSI. We deploy that + ietab plus to get around any apps that don't like Firefox (fewer these days, only thing we use it for now is Exchange Web mail 2007, being that the full featured version only works in IE). We deploy to 100's of desktops without any issues.

Re:Regarding IE

[atomicbutterfly]

Like I said to another poster though, whatever these 3rd-party mechanisms are to integrated with Windows Domains better, they're not from Mozilla. Frankly I don't even think IT even cares about such matters. They have a corporate firewall, carefully designed group policies, and so on. IE 7+ has tabs, and with the upcoming switch to Windows 7 will also have a sandbox for IE, which none of the other browsers even have. You'd have to find a reason for those guys to get off their arses and support Firefox to the level that IE is, and I guarantee you they won't, because there's not enough justification for the effort. We're already locked into Windows/Microsoft.

Re:Regarding IE

[jinushaun]

I wish I had points to vote this up.

Slashdot likes to paint this as an organisation in love with everything MS. I'm more pragmatic and see it an organisation maintaining the status quo. Everyone already knows how to use Office, documents are already produced in Office formats, etc. It would cost them a non-trivial amount of time and money (read: a lot) to move to an open source system just to satisfy some religious debate about open v closed source products. Even if they convert to ODF internally, they still have to go through the hassle of converting everything to Office formats anyway when it comes time to share files externally. The Office formats are the lingua franca of information exchange. Everyone has to support that. Even MS has to keep supporting .doc along side .docx.

Of course, the other side to that argument is that it is relative small short term cost for huge long term savings. Office is expensive and it costs a lot to maintain the status quo.

Re:Regarding IE

[Techman83]

I found enough good reasons to make our Win7 image to have a prominent Firefox icon, with IE buried in the menus. People can use either, but most go with the path of least resistance, in this case it will be Firefox. It's actually really easy to manage the things most IT departments need to manage. I should know, that's what I do day in, day out.

Re:Regarding IE

[deniable]

We support Firefox here for anyone who asks for it, using an unofficial version that supports GPOs for install and configuration. We had a fight to deploy IE7 and 8 because our finance and HR are outsourced to another government department with a lot of Oracle junk that required IE6. Strangely enough Firefox 2 did a better job with it than IE7 until last year's updates. Bottom line, IE6 sticks around because of the back-ends rather than GPO convenience.

Re:Regarding IE

[deniable]

It's often not the desktop IT that blocks it but the back-end 'Intranet Application' types. FF has reach the point where we can treat it like our other applications (with help) but it can't render some of the horrible, old and expensive back-ends. IT does care in a lot of places. We don't want to be stuck with IE either.

Re:Regarding IE

[Anonymous Coward]

MSI package deployment

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Yellowdog_Updater,_Modified
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Advanced_Packaging_Tool

Re:Regarding IE

[MightyMartian]

The real cost will be felt in fifty years, decades after Microsoft has abandoned Word 97-2003 formats, or maybe there's no Microsoft at all, and someone has to reverse engineer what really is a fucking terrible document standard.

Re:Regarding IE

[TwistedPants]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231062

Re:Regarding IE

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you blame Mozilla? I'm not seeing it. The same is true for Microsoft's software. You have zero warranty for any particular purpose according to the EUL.You are making excuses rather than bringing it up to your superiors in charge of IT policy.

Re:Regarding IE

[Tubal-Cain]

And how do you tell several hundred machines to download it? Have a custom metapackage on a private repo?

Re:Regarding IE

[gblues]

Holy shit, that goes back to 2004. 7 years. In the time it's taken to get anywhere on it, two major versions of Windows have been released. It's like the Duke Nukem Forever of FireFox bugs.

Re:Regarding IE

[Malc]

Huh? When was NTLM last a problem in a Mozilla browser?

Come on, that's a bit weak.

Re:Regarding IE

[eulernet]

The summary comment about how "96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer" should not be a surprise to anyone - it's the mandated platform for nearly all corporations these days, at least here and in the US.

Yes, but which version of IE is really used ?
IE6, IE7 or IE8 ?

Re:Regarding IE

[jimicus]

How do you blame Mozilla? I'm not seeing it. The same is true for Microsoft's software. You have zero warranty for any particular purpose according to the EUL.You are making excuses rather than bringing it up to your superiors in charge of IT policy.

He's not, I've seen the same thing before.

You know you can't usefully blame a software vendor. I know you can't usefully blame a software vendor. But do the senior management know, understand and accept they can't usefully blame a software vendor? 9 times out of 10, the answer's no.

In fact, quite often it's not only "no", it's "no, and they won't accept being told by underlings".

Re:Regarding IE

[Anonymous Coward]

If the rest of your IT environment were standards-compliant instead of Microsoft-proprietary, then you would not have to tinker with NTLM authentication in Firefox. The real problem is, that stuff like Group Policies and MSI packages are the ONLY way to configure a network of computers in the "Microsoft world", only because the Windows operating system is so inflexible and closed. Doing anything else with Windows than what the MS developers thought about is a major PITA, essentiall, you can not easily do anything for which Windows does not have a ready-made dialog window somewhere.

However, with open operating systems like Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, etc. it is easier to manage the configuration of many computers with self-made tools than it is to manage a network of Windows computers with Microsoft-supplied tools; plus, you can do whatever you could think of.

I strongly believe, that "those hacks and repackaged releases" are a much more flexible, reliable and open way of managing multiple computers than some proprietary closed-source unmodifiable Microsoft utiltiy that is meant to manage a certain version of another Microsoft product.

I also would like to add, that many Group Policies are actually "bad hacks" - much worse than the hacks that you reffered to. For example, "disable command line" or "disable registry editing" are group policies that many Microsoft administrators consider "security features", while actually these are only obscurity features; neither running a command line nor editing the registry requires privileges at the operating system level, so these group policies can be circumvented very easily (and I have done so numerous times).

My personal opinion is that most Microsoft-equipment administrators simply lack a fundamental understanding of Information Technology (systems administration, systems engineering, programming, software design), so they think that Windows is the most configurable platform because it's Graphical User Interface has the most buttons. However, with some understanding of operating systems design, it is fairly easy to understand, that there are other - and better - ways of managing computers than by clicking pre-defined buttons in a configuration assistant program.

Re:Regarding IE

[__aaqvdr516]

You pretty much nailed it. The company I work for is exactly the same (in the US).

Re:Regarding IE

[Anon-Admin]

Strange, I took the statement to be an indication that the most common desktop was windows. I also took it to be an indication that, in the land down under, Microsoft had a strong hold over the government. Unlike in some other countries where they have begun to choose open standards and have started switching government employees to Linux, BSD, or other types of desktops.

Re:Regarding IE

[Anon-Admin]

You use SSH Put the package on an http server, then write a script to do the following replacing $HOSTNAME with the name of the host on the network. ssh -l $USER $HOSTNAME sudo rpm -ivh http://web.server.name/location/of/rpm/yum-100.123.2.rpm Make sure to cap the output so you can rummage through it the next morning and make sure it worked on all the servers. Or fix the ones it did not work on. If you are running windows, you start by reinstalling all the systems with a fresh linux image.

Re:Regarding IE

[Lorien_the_first_one]

I think I spoke too soon. I can see your point there.

Re:Regarding IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Word 97-2003 formats have already been publicly documented by Microsoft. OpenOffice and its forks can read these files; the formatting will sometimes be messed up, but if what you care about is the actual contents, you should be fine.

Re:Regarding IE

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/officebinaryformats.mspx

Microsoft released all of the specs for the office 97-2003 formats in Febuary 2008. Problem is those specs represent several million man hours worth of labor to implement and any attempt to duplicate them would need that much work.

Here is a god read from Joel on Software about the complications with any spec that is that massive. Read it up and you'll see Microsoft knew what they were doing, its just that technology has shifted (They were originally designed to run as fast as possible on old computers)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

Re:Regarding IE

[sabt-pestnu]

Interesting you should say that NTLM got shoehorned into Firefox. The Wikipedia page says "Microsoft no longer recommends using NTLM in applications".

So... I guess you're having to work with legacy apps that do use NTLM?

Or did Microsoft simply raise the bar once Firefox got that capability?

Re:Regarding IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks nice, but it would never pass muster with those who set IT policy unfortunately.

When "whose who set IT policy" hear you say this nonsense, your arguments become circular. Get over yourself

Re:Regarding IE

[Eclipse-now]

You sound sympathetic to Open Source, so what would it take to swing Australian government and business around, especially when Russia have already mandated that everything on public desktops has to be open source by 2015?

Re:Regarding IE

[ancienthart]

Your argument is disingenuous. There's quite a bit of a difference between Active Directory/Group Policies and OOXML/OpenDocuments.
The examples you've used require the interaction between actively running technologies across multiple systems and programs.
OOXML/OpenDocuments just requires that an office suite can OPEN and SAVE the damn things.

Re:Choice

[biryokumaru]

I never realized it was our high moral standard that brought us into that war, and not simply an attack on our soil.

Not a real government

[Dr. Hellno]

Every Australian I've ever encountered on the internet recognizes that their government is a perverse congress of clowns and anencephalic monsters. Why bother with stories discussing what they think? While I don't support censoring their speech (a charity they refuse to repay in kind), I do think that their manic ramblings deserve the same global attention as a loud fart in a third-grade classroom in Pawtucket

Re:Not a real government

[bmo]

I do think that their manic ramblings deserve the same global attention as a loud fart in a third-grade classroom in Central Falls.

Fixed.

Re:Not a real government

[catmistake]

I had been given a different impression of their government. It sounded like they did some things correct. For example, in the US, when, say, a bridge is built and it's determined a toll is needed to pay for the bridge for ten years, that toll remains forever. In AU, once they pay for the bridge, the tolls go away. It sounded like their government was more honest and didn't attempt to hang on to revenue generation that was unfounded. I believe Microsoft technologies can be hardened and secure at the desktop level, and Active Directory is simply the best thing to come out of Redmond, Exchange a distant second, and there seem to be few technologies that can duplicate all it's functionality. However, to say that switching to Windows in the data center is a money saving decision is ridiculously short sighted. Just babysitting a Windows Server can cost a small fortune in IT hours alone, forgetting for a second that every few years Microsoft will want you to upgrade software and licensing, without really adding any functionality, reliability or security (due to backwards compatibility, the flaws will remain). To hear about this is somewhat disconcerting to me, and I wonder what really happened here. It's so painfully obvious that in the data center that Linux or a BSD (Free, Net or Open) is quite obviously far more secure, far more stable (no Windows rot), and far less expensive than Microsoft solutions, on any scale. Homogenizing the entire government on a single OS is a bad idea (all your eggs in one basket), and that it's Windows seems to me insanely stupid (Meet the AU botnets!).

Re:Not a real government

[dbIII]

All governments are like that to a degree. The only difference is that Australians can get away with saying it.
This will probably annoy some Americans who will mutter about free speech, but it's not really about that. Instead it's about not giving automatic reverence simply because of a job title. One example of the difference is shown in this Chaser video where the leader of Australia was approached by a man with a fake axe and then a running chain saw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSJ6OR9tx8
If somebody tried that with Bush, Cheney or Obama there is a real risk that they would get shot.

I do think that their manic ramblings deserve the same global attention as a loud fart in a third-grade classroom

No the reason it deserves little attention has nothing to do with that but everything to do with it being a country of merely twenty million people on the far side of the planet - I mean how much attention do you pay to Manilla, Seoul or Sao Paulo which could each hold about the same number of people? You just get the articles about Australia here because we fill slashdot with them when the US editors are asleep.

Re:Choice

[Missing.Matter]

Aaaaaaaaand Godwined.

OOXML? Not really...

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISO approved OOXML has mathematical bugs in spreadsheet formula. The government cannot have endorsed the ISO OOXML standard.

Instead, they've chosen Ecma 376 (first edition, 2006) which is the version that everyone knows the bugs about. This is the version that failed to achieve ISO acceptance because it was riddled with bugs and accessibility problems.

While any government can internally use any format they wish I think there'd be a fairly good legal challenge to this on grounds of accessibility problems with the format, and worker discrimination.

Here's some analysis of the accessibility problems in Ecma 376 (2006), http://holloway.co.nz/ooxml-accessibility.pdf

AGIMO justify their decision by saying that "over 99% of government PCs currently use the ECMA-376 standard." but that means that they're running Microsoft Office
2007 (or later) and you could equally say that this suite uses ODF 1.0.

Fun and games

[Anonymous Coward]

Having to deal with government departments in Aus is a pain. As one poster noted, most of the desktops use only IE6 - writing web apps for this space is frustrating as hell. Their IT departments seem to be full of uber-stressed bureaucrats who freak out over the idea of bumping up past what is now a 10 year old browser. Another fun one, up until recently trying to lodge Workcover payments as a business required the use of IE5 on the Mac - for security reasons!!! Easy fix was just to change the agent settings in Safari and everything worked just fine.

But to be fair, we hardly take them to task. "She'll be right, mate!"

Firefox = not very good for corporate.

[splerdu]

Didn't have an MSI installer or GPO support for years on end,
has bad support for multiple instances (if you are running more than one session on the same machine, firefox won't even launch)
can't administer settings remotely, or lock down settings pages based on user rights.

Firefox is great browser, but it's very difficult to deploy and administer to a large corporate environment.
The recently added MSI installer is a step in the right direction, but there's still some ways for Firefox to go before it can really break into corporate.

Re:Firefox = not very good for corporate.

[Nemyst]

Like ActiveX support? What you say is true, but unfortunately even IE7, IE8 or the upcoming IE9, which will all have the specifications you're listing, aren't getting as much adoption as they should, mostly because business applications still rely on antiquated technologies that only run in IE6.

The biggest hurdle to a move forward are those internal web applications.

Re:Firefox = not very good for corporate.

[Malc]

has bad support for multiple instances (if you are running more than one session on the same machine, firefox won't even launch)

Wrong. I regularly have it running concurrently under two logon sessions on Windows 7 Enterprise x64. I took my local admin privs away from my domain account, so I often login concurrently with a local admin account when I'm doing something that will need me to type my password a lot and an admin cmd prompt isn't sufficient. Thus I frequently have two instances of FF.

Re:Firefox = not very good for corporate.

[splerdu]

I meant when you're logged on as the same user into more than one session, FF won't start and quits with the "Firefox is already running but isn't responding" warning. It's not uncommon to have an administrator account logged on to the same machine using two different remote desktop sessions.

Re:Firefox = not very good for corporate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently added MSI installer? It has been available for 3 years now....

And all what you said was possible to do even earlier than MSI/GPO support, if you just know how to maintain a custom application in big environment. If admin were just a monkey pressing GPO rules in and out, then everything is very difficult...

Re:Firefox = not very good for corporate.

[ancienthart]

At my place of employment, all software is managed by images. Is it that difficult to run an exe on the original image rather than an msi, before copying the image out to all the other machines.

Re:Firefox = not very good for corporate.

[Malc]

Is this with a shared profile?

AGIMO Comments re-opened

[Anonymous Coward]

The department/agency responsible has re-opened comment on the COE due to the level of interest the announcement caused. Have your say.

Re:AGIMO Comments re-opened

[shipw]

Read more about why, and add comments, on the office's blog: http://agimo.govspace.gov.au/2011/01/21/back-to-the-future-another-chance-to-influence-coe-development

Re:Choice

[YoshiDan]

OMG the big bad government mandated that all internal documents have to be in a common format that is used by the majority of the corporate world! OHNOES the evil bastards! This is an outrage!

The more things remain the same

[bakes]

People raised concerns when Australia was voting whether to accept OOXML as a standard. We were ignored, Australia went ahead and voted Yes.

Do you think they are going to care about any protests now that they have mandated using it? No way.

What do we do next? Protesting votes by voting out the politicians doesn't change who runs the govt departments - they just report to different ministers, and keep doing what they are doing. Until we get someone who actually (a) Understands, and (b) Cares, we are going to continue to be screwed. Unfortunately other industries experience the same issues, not just the IT industry

Re:The more things remain the same

[zbaron]

No, Standards Australia abstained in the vote to fast track DIS29500.

They've been scammed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost like they've been mislead by the presence of the word "Open" in the title, which as I've said before is a dirty trick by Microsoft because

- the word has a positive connotation
- in implies independence from vendor lock-in
- it seems to want to create confusion between it and the name of the cross-platform product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.

Clearly, since it has "open" in the title, they can get a bit of that warm feeling in their stomach that they are somehow contributing to more "openness" in the sense of open source and/or open government.

Of course you and I know that this is simply a veneer over a complicated mess of a standard that nobody could hope to both implement and be reliably compatible with Microsoft's implementation.

But you know, some people understand specifications and other people make decisions.

Re:They've been scammed

[Mr_Tulip]

It's a hell of a lot better than Microsoft's previous formats, which were practically binary-only, and which were proprietary, meaning no one was legally allowed to write software that output files in that format. OPen Document format is similar to ODF, in that it's basically a zipped XML file, which contains enough data to read and make sense of the entire document, in most cases. It's not hard to write apps that read, write and process that data, nor is it illegal to do so.

I agree that in some cases, the 'standard' is convoluted and contains edge cases that make it nearly impossible to render OpenXML documents 100% accurately, however, it is quite possible to produce valid OpenXML documents using any decent programming tools.

As far as standards that are a "complicated mess", I really don't need to look much past HTML / CSS. The scope of what HTML can do is supposed to be much less than the entire Office suite of software, however, there are still major incompatibilities and unsupported features for all browsers. (of course, IE is a a major source of issues, but Safari does make me want to cry sometimes)

Re:They've been scammed

[Gadget_Guy]

it seems to want to create confusion between it and the name of the cross-platform product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.

To be fair, OpenOffice.org does have the name Office in it so you could say that Microsoft didn't start it!

But seriously folks, I don't think that it is a problem to "imply independence from vendor lock-in" because that is the point of making, publishing and standardising the format after all. They wanted other office products to use their format.

Re:Choice

[0123456]

OMG the big bad government mandated that all internal documents have to be in a common format that is used by the majority of the corporate world!

LOL.

Every time someone sends me a .docx file at work I'm glad I run Linux with Open Office because the Windows PCs all have Office 2000 so they can't read it.

Re:Choice

[AHuxley]

While telling the world about been "vendor-neutral".
If they wanted MS only, why not do a local version of the "no bid contract" and then it would all be fine.

Re:Fuck the Aussie Govt

[deniable]

They're also more cheese-cake, but less lawnmower. Define your terms, please.

Let's not be so hard on AU

[atari2600a]

Maybe their government was stupid enough to think Windows & Mac was "every platform"! Hey-- it's not like they prematurely said they won a resource war while using non-existent weapons for justification!

What's in a name

[Anonymous Coward]

It irks me every time I read OOXML.

It's was either named with an intention to confuse, or a backhanded slap at OOo.*

Are people too blind to see it?

*Maybe I'm wrong. Don't sue me bro.

Re:What's in a name

[PeterBrett]

It irks me every time I read OOXML.

The level of dis-ingenuity and sophism represented by the name of that "so-called" standard used to make me almost nauseous with disgust. Maybe I've got hardened to it by now.

It's not really a 'Standard'

[rsilvergun]

At least, that's why I've heard. The issue is that the documents Microsoft Office makes don't confirm to the OOXML standard. Programs that perfectly implement the OOXML standard can't ready documents created by MS-Word.

Re:It's not really a 'Standard'

[GNious]

So doesn't this mean that MS-Word is non-compliant and therefore the bias is actually ANTI-MS?

Re:It's not really a 'Standard'

[rollingcalf]

"So doesn't this mean that MS-Word is non-compliant and therefore the bias is actually ANTI-MS?"

No, the bias is for MS because other noncompliant software gets rejected, while MS Office is accepted despite being noncompliant.

You know...

[rsilvergun]

I'm tired of Bureaucracy being blamed for good 'ole fashion political corruption. Did it ever occur to any one that the Bureaucrats just do what they're told, and it's the elected officials ramming this through? It's like when New Orleans was destroyed in floods. Everybody blamed the guy that ran FEMA, and nobody pointed out the he was just an organizer for the flood response, and he had not authority to order the Nation Guard in to shore up the levies. Also, nobody asked why the National Guard wasn't shoring up the levies early on (hint: they were all deployed in Iraq, still are too).

Mark my words, this anti-Bureaucrat nonsense is the start of a class war to pit private employees against public so the rich can drop all our wages without us noticing. You'll be too busy wondering why the public sector employees have it so good to ask why you've got it so bad...

Re:You know...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I'm tired of Bureaucracy being blamed for good 'ole fashion political corruption.

Oh? You have evidence of political corruption? Nah, of course you don't. Who needs it anyway? There are so many other cases supported large bodies of evidence that nobody is going to notice if we jump to conclusions about one or two cases, right? I'm sure such certainty came from a careful consideration of the facts.

Re:You know...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of political corruption being blames for no-brainer decisions involving standardizing on something everyone is already using.
That makes us both tired. Let's take a nap.

Re:Choice

[Tubal-Cain]

So you can read docx files in Open Office? Interesting how everyone here is carrying on that no other office suites support these formats.

It'll read it, for the most part, and may even write it now, but there are formatting issues. It doesn't have certifiable support for the format, so using it would technically be breaking the rules.

Sure its biased

[ugen]

The only way it would not be considered biased here on /. is if it selected Linux and Open Office ;) Sheesh.

(Let's see how soon collective /. consciousness mods this down to "troll" so as not to see an opinion different from the general consensus)

Re:Sure its biased

[Samantha Wright]

Mate, it's not biased because of one platform versus another, it's biased because OOXML isn't a widely-supported (or well-supported) standard, and they're picking it on the false premise that it is. Office 2010 supports ODF natively, and 2007 and 2003 support it with a plugin—those are the same suites that support OOXML (2003 needs a plugin). The fact that they chose to go with the Microsoft-only format tips the hand.

Re:Sure its biased

[scdeimos]

Ok, how do you explain this then?

On Office 2007:

The 2007 Office system supports the ECMA-376 Office Open XML Formats standard, which was later submitted to ISO/IEC and was published in late 2008 as the ISO/IEC 29500 Office Open XML Formats standard.

And on Office 2010:

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

My gut feeling is that this is just idiocy in government and someone without a clue wrote this particular requirement. If Microsoft was behind this then surely they wouldn't have asked for ECMA-376 because their current version of Office can't even write it.

Re:Sure its biased

[Gadget_Guy]

Mate, it's not biased because of one platform versus another, it's biased because OOXML isn't a widely-supported (or well-supported) standard, and they're picking it on the false premise that it is.

You can say it isn't widely supported, but it is widely used - way more than ODF. And considering that 99% of the files are already in that format and do not require conversion (which would inevitably lead to formatting differences) then you can't say that there are no benefits to choosing that format and that this therefore must be the result of bias.

In my business, I would love to move to a free office suite, but most of our files get sent to other people outside this company and so we have to use the format that makes it easy to deal with the real world.

Re:Sure its biased

[walshy007]

but most of our files get sent to other people outside this company and so we have to use the format that makes it easy to deal with the real world.

So you use pdf then?

Re:Sure its biased

[Gadget_Guy]

So you use pdf then?

No, this is for collaborative editing purposes.

Re:Sure its biased

[Samantha Wright]

Office 2007 and 2010 don't actually conform to the standard. ECMA-376 was written as an attempt to describe 2007's behaviour, and it's (a) frequently inadequate (the standard doesn't explain some options and features) and (b) wrong in some places, because Office is so woefully complex. As a result, one cannot implement the standard and expect compatibility with Office. This is not the case for ODF. Despite the standard, OOXML is effectively proprietary. Perhaps you've forgotten the fiasco of Microsoft paying off meetings and representatives that was necessary to make it an ISO standard?

Sure, maybe this is just a bureaucratic bungle—in a world of incompetence and malice, there's plenty of room for both—but by standardizing on OOXML they're harming the future accessibility of their documents, and that's a big deal. When one is aware of all of the facts in the situation, as no doubt the poor bureaucrat "without a clue" now is, it's obvious that OOXML is a bad choice.

Re:Sure its biased

[walshy007]

I'd say latex plaintext then with accompanying pdf rendered version.

Then again the real world is a lot more forgiving in layout and style than anal-retentive latex users are ;)

Re:Sure its biased

[Gadget_Guy]

I'm sure all our clients, suppliers, government departments etc will be *REALLY* happy to have to move to such a system. I already said that we couldn't use ODF because everyone with whom we communicate uses Microsoft products. Asking them all to use Latex would be even worse that asking them to install a plug-in for the software that they currently use. It would be financial suicide.

No other office suite?

[Chas]

Uhm. News flash, even MS Office doesn't fully support said "standard"!

AND IT'S THEIR FUCKING "STANDARD"!

Re:No other office suite?

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't that mean that Australia can't use word processing software any more? Since no products support that standard, there are none available to use any more. Problem solved.

Upgrade plan

[Anonymous Coward]

I figure that the only way to move away from IE6 is for Facebook to not support this browser (not only logging in, but actually making viewing pages a pain). As for moving away from OOXML, I don't have a clue but it'll have to be that drastic.

Re:Upgrade plan

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they tried that sort of thing when youtube stopped supporting ie6.

black is white

[bzipitidoo]

OOXML is vendor neutral. Nixon is not a crook. Gorbachev has been removed from his position due to illness. Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman. Diebold voting machines were validated. AIG is a financially sound company. No oil is leaking from BP's well. Kim Jong Il's birth was heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.

Awfully common. I've seen the Big Lie used so often that we've gotten wise to it. I wonder how such whoppers can still work at all. Mostly it just makes the teller look brutishly stupid. The more obvious it is, the stupider they look. So, Australian Govt, are you too stupid to feel embarrassed about this? Are your flunkies and subjects all supposed to pretend to be too stupid to notice, so that you don't punish them?

Re:black is white

[Whalou]

Sadly "Kim Jong Il's birth was heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens. is the affirmation the most likely to be true, if only by luck/coincidence.

Re:black is white

[Lorien_the_first_one]

Perhaps we give them too much credit to be stupid. What if they are just sub-clinically psychopathic and don't know it yet?

Re:black is white

[Anonymous Coward]

Use CAPS. I don't think they can hear you.

Re:black is white

[Svartalf]

And you're using the Big Lie there too.

OOXML's not vendor neutral- the only player really using OOXML is Microsoft and the version that they're using in MS Office isn't really interoperable with anything but...

wait for it...

MS Office.

Re:black is white

[laddiebuck]

That was the point of his post.

Death-throws of IE6

[aussie_a]

You'd have to find a reason for those guys to get off their arses and support Firefox to the level that IE is

As someone who is "one of those guys" I take issue with this. The reason we use IE still is due to legacy programs requiring IE6. Now I hate IE6 more than anyone else in my building. As someone who has spent years developing websites, I know the terror of IE6. But I've had it explained to me that we can support 1 browser with our resources (fortunately the webteam aren't required to follow this policy for the external websites). It can be either IE or Firefox. Due to the fact we must support IE6 only programs, we must support IE.

The vendor has finally released upgrades that don't require IE6, they don't make these upgrades available for free. And even then, companies or government agencies moving to the latest greatest program immediately is a recipe for disaster. Instead its often better to remain a version or two behind the latest developments, in order to minimise the number of bugs that will affect the system. Meanwhile other departments are asking us to invest in these other amazing systems, that have IE as a requirement. But its all good, because we already use IE. Right?

So give IT a bigger budget with more staff members and more control over what programs are purchased, and I'm sure they'd be happy to support Firefox. Most of them are probably geeks, so they probably use Firefox when at home anyway.

Re:Death-throws of IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember having a conversation around ten years ago with some others in the IT department about what the supported browser going forward should be. I told them flat-out that standardising on IE was a bad idea, because we had a mix of Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris desktops. They did. Now I just sit back and laugh at them trying to dig their way out of the hole they got into.

How can it be any clearer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the Special Olympics, no matter how you try to sell it, it's still retarded.

Who is taking the bribes then?

[BestNicksRTaken]

So exactly which politician is taking the M$ bribes then? Come on, name and shame time.

Sticking with MSIE is just dependence on an archaic IT infrastructure, and no respect for security, but forcing the use of OOXML just makes no sense other than for vendor lock-in.

What Office Suite does OOXML?

[miffo.swe]

To my knowledge no Office Suite does OOXML at all, not even Microsofts. I guess anyone can just write "OOXML" on their Office Suite and sell it just as Microsoft does so this shouldnt be a problem really.

Actually, no office suite in the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

The requirement is "read and write". There's nothing available at the moment. And ISO is a fucking joke. http://noooxml.org/

So they can't use any software then

[magpie]

So basically they have decided to adopt a 'standard' that no one, even Microsoft, implements correctly? I assume they mean the ISO one. Just demand that they only use software that implements it correctly according to the standard and what them have fun.

Sorry Office 2010 doesn't to the open standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry Office 2010 doesn't to the open standard.

PS even if it did you'd still be demanding everyone but Office 2010 which requires Vista or 7, which requires newer hardware and Dx10 accelleration.

ODF or PDF would have been free.

Re:Choice

[makomk]

Most offices I've been in run 2003 or higher. Office 2003 supports docx via a compatibility update that was released for it after Office 2007 came out.

The stated reason for the Australian government choosing OOXML over ODF is that they have a whole bunch of Office 2003 and Office XP installs that they don't want to upgrade. I don't think Office XP has .docx support at all.

Buy any ANSI standard

[ThatsNotPudding]

On the second page will be listed the names of the folks involved with developing the standard. Ninety-five percent of the names also list a company / corporation they work for, most of whom will be the biggest dogs in whatever industry for which the standard is being written. If you dominate an industry, you too can impose your will from behind an ISO fig leaf.

Interoperability will always be an issue

[Anonymous Coward]

The point that this standard is promoted by Microsoft is pointless, the whole idea of it being an Open source and ISO standard is that regardless of the implementation, you'd be able to use it, so you're not forced to pay M$ top dollars for their products suite. It must also be pointed out that since this is an ISO standard M$ shouldn't be able to change it at will, which is also a plus.

On the other hand, OOXML standard is not implemented even by Microsoft, which makes the argument of interoperability moot at this point. If you buy into M$ Office, you'll be faced with a miriad of issues when trying to open the document in another non-M$ application.

But the thing is, OpenDocument Format is no good either. The standard is very vague on some key issues like security or change tracking, so in the end every implementation comes up with their own interpretation of the standard. This obviously leads to interoperability issues when trying to distribute a document, so you're stuck with the same problem.

So, I guess it's just a matter of picking your own poison, as you're going to have interoperability issues either way.

Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

The US White House had a very successful migration to Exchange.

No doubt the Australian Parliament already recognises the outright superiority of Microsoft solutions! It's the patriotic choice.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Two of those are about a custom automated archival system (ARMS) they had the source code to, and has nothing to do with Exchange other than it wasn't compatible. The same thing would have happened if it was any other (other than Lotus Notes) email server/client. Good thing they got rid of that open source POC and replaced it with something that works.

Re:Yes!

[Eskarel]

And again, write a better one, and I don't mean a better e-mail server, I mean a better exchange.

Re:Yes!

[anomaly256]

You mean like zimbra?

Re:Yes!

[anomaly256]

Yes,it does the calendar, briefcase, everything that exchange does. Even outlook is happy on it.

Open XML is not required

[wonkavader]

This is hilarious.

They standardise on things which can read and write OOXML, forcing things to be MS Word, then they say "but you can use any document format you want, so long as what produced it can read and write OOXML." This means people will upgrade to the newest Office, and use the slightly different default non-OOXML format, and those docs will float around, and the path of least resistance will be to upgrade everyone, again. They're specifically embracing the MS trap.

This is a bad decision, but it would be half as bad if they said "everyone has to use OOXML." At least then they'd actually have inter-operability with their versions of Word.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Don't think you've escaped DOC. OOXML has binary blobs in it. And "corner cases" is way understating the semantics problem; in many cases it is defined to "do what Word XXX does". Um, right.

2) HTML and CSS are tiny, elegant and well defined standards compared to the towering crapheap that is OOXML.

Open Office or Libre Office

[blarkon]

Of course if Oz government IT peoples had been following Slashdot they'd also know that there is a big fork of Open Office to Libre Office where there seems to be no real guarantee that either will be around in 3 years time (some of the code might be, but can you imagine trying to explain byzantine Open Source politics to a PHB?)

"You should standardize on Libre Office"
"How long has that been around?"
"Well that's a question with a complicated answer ...."

Re:Open Office or Libre Office

[hduff]

Of course if Oz government IT peoples had been following Slashdot they'd also know that there is a big fork of Open Office to Libre Office where there seems to be no real guarantee that either will be around in 3 years time (some of the code might be, but can you imagine trying to explain byzantine Open Source politics to a PHB?)

"You should standardize on Libre Office"

"How long has that been around?"

"Well that's a question with a complicated answer ...."

They should dump the stupid LibreOffice name and call it OOXMLOffice.

Win!

"The policy is vendor-neutral."

[hduff]

A: You can see their mouths moving.

Standard Operatign Procedure

[Anonymous Coward]

The powers that be in Australia have always been in bed with Micro$oft. Who do you think takes them out to business dinners and the like? They just don't think of anything else, M$ has the financial might to persuade politicians and the like. When Tel$tra started Bigpond internet, it was almost totally M$-centric right from the word go,
even Macs were barely supported.

Just more of the same old same old.

Re:Choice

[nonicknameavailable]

i just delete every msooxml file

Re:Choice

[david_thornley]

What got the US into a war with Germany was the US blatant favoritism towards the Allies (particularly Britain after the fall of France), which violated the Hague conventions on neutrality. I think the first serious violation was transferring fifty old and crappy but still useful destroyers to Britain, around the start of 1941. By September 1941, the USN was on a full war footing with the Germans, deliberately engaging in combat with German warships (specifically, submarines).

That's about three months of all-out undeclared war at sea before the Pearl Harbor attack. You can attribute the war with Japan to their attack, but not the war with Germany.

Re:Choice

[Svartalf]

Which makes the lie they're telling even more bald-faced.

Doing my bit...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm working on a fairly high-profile Government project at the moment and as part of the proposal my company has mandated the use of Open Source software wherever practical.

The results of this project will be directly visible by the general public.

Through this project, my company is heavily pushing Open Source solutions as not only a more cost-effective, but as a more stable, reliable and providing better features and usability for the end users. It's also being pushed as being easier to support and having greater community knowledge available.

Re:Choice

[PhunkySchtuff]

Why don't the PCs at your work have the free Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats installed?

Re:Infortrend Microsoft

[Douglas Goodall]

When the RAID manufacturer INFORTREND wanted their Santa Rosa office on the Internet. I got them to sign up for a frame relay with Sonic.Net. Then I installed a FreeBSD system that ran email and web and DNS flawlessly for years. I got Samba running and integration with their Windows 200 Pro workstations. I did whatever it took to keep their domain alive, and when their frame relay went down, I re-hosted their WEB and MAIL, and because I was the secondary, their clients still had FTP support. I had (what I thought was) a great relationship with the Tech Support Manager whom I reported to. Eventually the chinese mother company get a new CIO in silicon valley who mandated Microsoft for DNS, WEB, and Exchange for email. When asked to roll out all this crap, I refused for various reasons. They fired me, the Tech Support Manager accused me of letting him down and of bad faith. All that "good faith" I thought I had built up over four or so years of great service was vaporized in an instant when Microsoft reared it's ugly head in their enterprise. The manager whom I had thought was one of my best friends, I guess was forced to drink the coolaid by his company. What a waste of my devotion to a client. Oh I felt good about my performance, but both of us felt betrayed, and for what?

Re:Choice

[ancienthart]

Here here. Exact same thing happens to me as an educator. Students bring in assignments as docx, and we're still using XP and Office 2000.
So the other teachers say "I'm sorry, we can't read that, you'll have to save it as an older format."
And then I go, "Give it to me. I have OpenOffice."
I wonder if the government plans to expand our budget to update all the school computers. Considering we still have asbestos-based tiles in our staffroom, I'm thinking, probably not!

Re:Choice

[ancienthart]

As Tubal-Cain states, formatting doesn't survive when reading OOXML in OpenOffice.
You get the text, styles and fonts, but everything else floats all over the place.

Re:Choice

[ancienthart]

Because I work for a government agency, and even though our IT Tech is on top of things, he has to get permission at a state level for nearly every piece of software he installs?
He was swearing a week ago because an update procedure he HAD to use (Step 1. Shut down drive P.) disabled three other pieces of software, INCLUDING the timetabling application.

Nixon Was not a crook

[Anonymous Coward]

Nixon did very little wrong, he took tapes from his office which were to be honest his property. Nixon was a great man and despite his anti communism stance he was greatly respected by Mao Zedong.