Sun Monday urged a Massachusetts state official to rethink an opinion that Microsoft's Open XML meets the state's parameters for an acceptable open document format just because it has been submitted as an open standard.

In a letter signed by Carl Cargill, director of corporate standards for Sun, the company asked the state to keep in mind the reasons for its previous commitment to the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) specification. The office of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has proposed to make OpenDocument the standard format for documents generated by state government agencies .

"The Commonwealth's process began as an effort to ensure that the documents created by its agencies would be owned by those offices and by its citizens for all eternity -- without the need to negotiate or pay for continued access to them again in the future each time a new version of proprietary software is released," Cargill wrote in the letter, viewed Monday by the IDG News Service. "This process began with a desire to create a level playing field so that innovation in the market would flourish, enabling better delivery of government services."

The letter is in response to a statement released by Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary Tom Trimarco last Wednesday, two days after Microsoft announced it would submit its proprietary Open XML format to two international standards bodies .

Microsoft will use Open XML in its Office productivity suite. The company submitted it to the International Standards Organization (ISO) and European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) for possible adoption as standards.

Microsoft has committed to handing over its Open XML document formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to be adopted as open standards in time for the launch of the next version of its Office software suite, code-named Office 12. In his statement last week, Trimarco said the state is "optimistic that Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats” if Microsoft follows through with this plan.

This leaves the door open for Massachusetts to continue to use Microsoft Office rather than migrate away from the suite, as it would do if it moved to OpenDocument. Microsoft Office does not support OpenDocument, but Sun's StarOffice, IBM's Workplace suite and OpenOffice.org's OpenOffice software do.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

Whitepapers

• Symantec State of the Data Center Report
• Monitoring and Managing App Performance
• Monitoring and Managing VoIP
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• Best Practices for HP Servers and HP Enterprise Virtual Array in a Microsoft Exchange

View more DATA CENTER whitepapers

Webcasts

• Data Protection and Application Availability for Your VMware Environment with Veritas NetBackup and Cluster Server for VMware ESX
• Making NetBackup Highly Available with Storage Foundation HA
• Managing the End User Experience-A Real World Example of Success
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape

View more DATA CENTER webcasts

Special Reports

• Symantec State of the Data Center Report
• Data Centers: At the center of the action
• Executive Guide: Data Center Decisions
• Get More From Your WAN
• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more DATA CENTER special reports