"In a not unanticipated move, Massachusetts announced today that Ecma 376, the name given to the Microsoft Office Open XML formats following their adoption by Ecma, would be acceptable for use by the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth."

"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."

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Wednesday added Open XML to its list of approved open documents formats.

"With about a week remaining to collect comments on a plan to adopt Ecma’s Open XML standard, Massachusetts is mum on how the issue is fairing, but some who disagree with the action are already voicing their opinion publicly."

Massachusetts has been a lightning rod and a leader in the movement for governments to embrace open document formats and neither of those roles change with Wednesday’s announcement that it will adopt Open XML.

"You know how I always tell you when I make a mistake? Well, it looks like I made one when I told you that I didn't think Massachusetts would care what you said in any emails about Microsoft's OfficeOpen XML specification (now Ecma 376) being proposed as an addition to their list of usable "open standards". I'm hearing that they are reading the emails and will take them seriously."

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.

Massachusetts is accepting comments on this decision until Friday, July 20th.
Please join us in letting them know that as a government, we expect them to use
a format for their documents that is independent of any proprietary vendor and
fully implementable in free software. OpenDocument meets that requirement;
MS-OOXML does not.

As regular readers will have noticed, I haven't blogged in awhile. This is in part because I'm on the road for most of six weeks, but also because the news about OOXML continues to be both more predictable as well as more intense.