Strategic Innovations, Inc.

Last week, the State of Massachusetts made some history by taking the official position that all State offices and agencies must use non-proprietary document formats, i.e. “open formats”.  This is an effort that has been underway for almost two years.  Why are they doing this?  The primary reason is to ensure that Massachusetts citizens are not required to use a certain software package to be able to read official State documents.  After all, these electronic documents belong to the people.  As one commentator (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eWEEK) noted, purchasing a car that only ran on one brand of gas would be foolish.  Similarly, producing public documents that can only be opened or read in one brand of software is equally foolish.  Another oft-mentioned reason is to ensure the availability of the documents long into the future.  20+ years from now, someone may have a need to open and read one of these documents (have you ever had to search back through your minutes?).  By saving them in an open format, with all of the technical details available, even if that format is no longer used on a regular basis, someone will be able to recreate whatever is necessary to open the document.

You may be asking, “what are 'open format' documents?”  In the case of Massachusetts, they have defined this as documents that comply with the OASIS OpenDocument format or the Portable Document Format(pdf).  The OpenDocument format was recently created by OASIS and is currently supported by several office productivity packages like OpenOffice (1.1.5, the current “stable” release reads it; 2.0, the upcoming release uses it as its native format), the upcoming StarOffice 8 (the commercial brethren of OpenOffice), and the soon to be released Sun Java Desktop System, IBM Workplace , Wordperfect Office Suite , KOffice , and Abiword .  The only major vendor not supporting this document format is Microsoft.   Of course, the pdf file format is most closely associated with Adobe and its line of Acrobat products.  What you may not know is an Adobe product is not required to read a pdf file or to produce one.  In fact, one of the most useful features of OpenOffice is its native ability to produce a pdf version of a document you are working on in OpenOffice (how many of you have purchased a full version of Acrobat, not just the reader, just to be able to produce pdf files of MS Word documents?).

If you are unfamiliar with some of these alternative office applications, I encourage you to try them out.  Here at Strategic Innovations, I have been using the betas of OpenOffice 2.0 for production for several months (I'm using it right now to draft this article) and can attest to its capability at meeting organizational needs for office productivity software.  Because it is free, I suggest you download a copy and try it out.  If you need help, I am always a <a href="/component/option,com_contact/Itemid,3/">phone call</a> or <a href="mailto: ">e-mail</a> away to provide some assistance.

If you have any questions about open formats, OpenOffice, implementing standards, or other technology issues, please drop me a line.

Jeffrey G. Causey, CPA
President