Massachusetts' open formats policy is off to a slow start with only 250 of the government's 50,000 PCs outfitted with the necessary technology. Since the policy was publicly introduced last year, the plan has seen resistance from state employees and Microsoft, lobbying heavily against the format change.

the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.

Back in March of 2006, I interviewed Alan Cote, the Supervisor of Public Records in the Public Records Division of the Massachusetts Secretary's office. Alan had testified back in October of 2005 in the hearing where Peter Quinn had been called on the carpet by Senator Marc Pacheco, the Chair of the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight.

"The commonwealth of Massachusetts has done a 180 degree turn and decided to support Microsoft's Office Open XML format in addition to the OASIS Open Document Format."

In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.

New York has become the latest U.S. state to ponder whether to use open standards for government document formats, though the move is not necessarily good news for proponents of the ISO standard ODF (Open Document Format).

Officials seek help with preserving government e-mails to show how decisions are made.

AUGUSTA — To most of us, e-mail feels less important than a letter.

According to a press release issued today by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve the OpenDocument Format as the single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement.

Remember the New York State group that was told to investigate longterm storage needs in government and ODF/OOXML? The report is now published, "A Strategy for Openness: Enhancing E-Records Access in New York State". You can get it here in doc, PDF and odt formats, although only PDF works currently. It's just been posted, so later they should all be there. What did they find?