U.K. Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents

The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.

Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for viewable government documents. The decision follows a long process that invited, and received, very extensive public input – over 500 comments in all (my comments can be found here).

According to the announcement:
When departments have adopted these open standards:
•    citizens, businesses and voluntary organisations will no longer need specialist software to open or work with government documents
•    people working in government will be able to share and work with documents in the same format, reducing problems when they move between formats
•    government organisations will be able to choose the most suitable and cost effective applications, knowing their documents will work for people inside and outside of government...