Office Open XML - Adoption

Adoption

Several countries have formally announced either adoption, or the evaluation of adoption of Office Open XML. In some cases the Office Open XML standard has a national standard identifier; In some cases the Office Open XML standard is permitted to be used where national regulation says that non-proprietary formats must be used, in other cases, it means that some government body has actually decided that Office Open XML will be used in some specific context.

Australia

Australia's Department of Finance has released a desktop policy that required all agencies to adopt Office Open XML as the standard document format.

Belgium

Belgium's Federal Public Service for Information and Communication Technology in 2006 was evaluating the adoption of the Office Open XML format. It already then confirmed that it would consider all ISO standards to be open standards, mentioning Office Open XML as such a possible future ISO standard.

Denmark

In June 2007, the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation recommended that beginning with January 1, 2008 public authorities must support at least one of the two word processing document formats Office Open XML or Open Document Format in all new IT solutions, where appropriate.

Germany

In Germany the Office Open XML standard is currently under observation by the Federal Commissioner for Information Technology ("Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik"). The latest release of "SAGA" (Standards and Architectures for E-Government-Applications) includes Office Open XML file formats in both its strict and transitional variant. The ISO/IEC 29500 standard may be used to exchange complex documents when further processing is required.

Japan

On June 29, 2007, the government of Japan published a new interoperability framework which gives preference to the procurement of products that follow open standards. On July 2 the government declared that they hold the view that formats like Office Open XML which organizations such as Ecma International and ISO had also approved was, according to them, an open standard. Also, they said that it was one of the preferences, whether the format is open, to choose which software the government shall deploy.

Lithuania

The Lithuanian Standards Board has adopted the ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Office Open XML format standard as the Lithuanian national standard. The decision was made by Technical Committee 4 Information Technology on March 5, 2009. The proposal to adopt the Office Open XML format standard was submitted by the Lithuanian Archives Department of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania.

Norway

Norway's Ministry of Government Administration and Reform evaluated the adoption of the Office Open XML format. The ministry put the document standard under observation in December 2007. The results of that evaluation period yielded a continuation of obligatory use of the OpenDocument Format standard for all government institutions and users as of January 1, 2011.

Sweden

Sweden has adopted Office Open XML as a 4 part Swedish National Standard SS-ISO/IEC 29500:2009.

Switzerland

In July 2007, the Swiss Federal Council announced adherence SAGA.ch e-Government standards mandatory for its departments as well as for cantons, cities and municipalities. The latest version of SAGA.ch includes Office Open XML file formats.

United Kingdom

The UK has put out an action plan for use of open standards, which includes ISO/IEC 29500 as one of several formats to be supported.

United States of America

On April 15, 2009, the ANSI-accredited INCITS organisation voted to adopt ISO/IEC 29500:2008 as an American National Standard.

The state of Massachusetts has been examining its options for implementing XML-based document processing. In early 2005, Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration and Finance in Massachusetts, was the first government official in the United States to publicly connect open formats to a public policy purpose: "It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access". Since 2007 Massachusetts has classified Office Open XML as "Open Format" and has amended its approved technical standards list — the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) — to include Office Open XML. Massachusetts, under heavy pressure from some vendors, now formally endorses Office Open XML formats for its public records.