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Posted on 5/26/2008 11:01:00 am by Nicolas and filed under ,
Becta, the British Government's lead agency for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in education, has recently complained to the European Commission about the interoperability of Microsoft OoXML standards.

The two main concerns regard the lack of interoperability of the Office 2007 products, and the anti-competitive licenses adopted by Microsoft for the Government and Education markets.

Becta's notes that Microsoft's format is not fully compatible with the competitive open standards (such as ODF aka Open Document format) and their complaint also argued that "even if the user succeeded in installing the ODF converters necessary to facilitate interoperability with competitor products, the resulting solution would nevertheless represent an unsatisfactory outcome for users and would act as a further barrier to competition and choice"

By default, Microsoft provides a plug-in that allow ODF documents to be opened with Word.
But for Becta as for OpenForum.org, a not-for-profit, independent European organisation launched to promote, broaden and strengthen the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in business and government, Microsoft decision is just not enough. According to Graham Taylor (Chairman of OpenForum Europe): "the ODF and Open Standards communities need to strengthen this support across the world to encourage Microsoft to fulfill their promise to implement ODF in native mode and as a genuine default option for users".

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