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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."
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...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Cheers, Chris
US Government denies Halliburton bias in mandating no-bid KBR contracts.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The nice thing about Standards is that there are so many to choose from.
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.
I never realized it was our high moral standard that brought us into that war, and not simply an attack on our soil.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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
Aaaaaaaaand Godwined.
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).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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!
... wait, what?
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.
The department/agency responsible has re-opened comment on the COE due to the level of interest the announcement caused. Have your say.
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.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
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
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
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.
Cheers, Chris
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Cheers, Chris
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
the patch for that attack is due to be deployed in 3 months
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.
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)
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.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They're also more cheese-cake, but less lawnmower. Define your terms, please.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
... wait, what?
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
UniNSW by any chance?
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.
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)
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Uhm. News flash, even MS Office doesn't fully support said "standard"!
AND IT'S THEIR FUCKING "STANDARD"!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
People need training to use firefox?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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?
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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.
Cheers, Chris
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?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
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.
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.
#include <sig.h>
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.
HTTP/1.1 400
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
My thoughts EXACTLY! K17 will never be the same...
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.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office-formula
Pirate Party UK
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.
Sharepoint is a PITA, but I've used some of it's competitors and they're worse.
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.
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?
Rethinking email
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..
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
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?
Pirate Party UK
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
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.
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.
"You should standardize on Libre Office" ...."
"How long has that been around?"
"Well that's a question with a complicated answer
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?
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A: You can see their mouths moving.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
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.
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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?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
i just delete every msooxml file
Mendacem Memorem Esse Oportet
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.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Which makes the lie they're telling even more bald-faced.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
And you are ignoring the following:
How can you sit there and honestly claim OpenFormula is a valid solution today?
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Why don't the PCs at your work have the free Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats installed?
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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.
Hey, you used "exponential" correctly. We don't like that around here, stop it!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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