Integration key issue in Massachusetts review of Open XML

The Commonwealth’s review of the format, however, could spark other states to re-evaluate their failed legislation

By John Fontana, Network World, 07/05/07

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The decision by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to consider adopting a second open document format could lead to integration issues but could also help revive similar legislation in other states.

Last week, Massachusetts proposed adopting the Open XML standard to go along with it use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). The state presented its Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) 4.0 for public review and listed under the draft’s major revisions “Ecma-376 Office Open XML File Formats.”

The draft is open to public comment until July 20. The final draft, which will become official state policy, is expected at the end of the month, Massachusetts officials say.

Open XML was derived from Microsoft’s Office OpenXML (ooXML), which is the default file format in Office 2007. The specification was approved as a standard in December by Ecma, an international membership-based standards organization for information and communication systems.

“[Open XML] does meet our criteria for an open standard,” says Bethann Pepoli, acting CIO of the Massachusetts Information Technology Division. “There is industry support for the format since it was approved in December.”

The industry support, however, is in the form of translators, and critics of Open XML say that will cause integration issues.

“Those companies are ‘implementing’ not through native support but through a so-called ooXML-ODF translator tool that is still in beta for spreadsheets and presentation and is nowhere near an adequate level of development even for text documents,” says Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance.

Open XML Translator 1.0 was released in February for free as an open source project on Source Forge, the software development Web site. A second beta of the OpenXML/ODF Translator for Excel and PowerPoint was release in May.

In July 2006, Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s business division product management group, acknowledged in a document titled “A Foundation for the New World of Documents” that “although file translation may not result in perfect document fidelity because of format and product differences, it is the most effective way to offer interoperability in a world where multiple file formats will need to coexist.”

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