(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)
The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The position of the German Foreign Office, as host of the event, was made very clear. The Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in his opening word, called ODF "a completely open and ISO-standardized format", considering it an "excellent basis" for "a free exchange of knowledge and information in a time of globalization". The Foreign Office has already linked its foreign missions in a network using open-source programs and shifted to OpenOffice and Linux operation systems on their laptops and has in view to extend this program to all diplomatic workstations by the middle of 2008.
According to Florian Schießl of the LiMux Project Office of Munich, where a migration to Linux is in progress, the ODF is a good tool in reducing the large range of templates and macros in the municipal government and in creating more uniform file management standards. The municipal administration of Freiburg will also implement a project for the migration of 2000 workstations from Microsoft Office 2000 to OpenOffice, relying in the future solely on ODF and PDF. ODF will also be adopted as the standard file format by all agencies and departments of Schwäbisch-Hall as Horst Bräuner, IT director, stated.
Germany is not the only country in favour of ODF. As expressed by Gavin Beckett of the city administration of Bristol, UK, a migration to Sun Microsystems's StarOffice is currently in progress in the city administrative offices. Mr. Beckett pointed out that the difficulty in the development of the progress is the inertia and habit of the office employees having been used Microsoft operation system for many years. "The point is to overcome deeply ingrained modes of behavior," he stated.
Brazil and India are also leaders in the use of open standards in the office area. Deivi Kuhn of Serpro, a company coordinating the use of open source in Brazil, declared that ODF standard adopted by the International Organization for Standardization, a good tool providing both access to knowledge and ensuring user freedoms, was mandatory for e-government state interoperability standards. In India, in the federal state of Assam, PCs with Linux and OpenOffice were given to students and the migration to open source software was in progress in government offices.
German Foreign Office comes out in favor of Open Document Format
(30.10.2007)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/98208
ODF Workshop (29-30.10.2007)
http://www.odfworkshop.org/
EDRI-gram: OOXML - negative vote at International Organization for
Standardization (12.09.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.17/ooxml-rejected-iso