May 13th, 2008
UK education agency nixes OOXML
Office Open XML – the open standard with a trademark in its name – might be good enough for the International Standards Organization but it’s not acceptable to British schools, InfoWeek reports.
“In the context of the education system,” lack of truly open standards in Office 2007 “can result in higher prices and a range of other unsatisfactory effects,” BECTA said in a statement.
“It is not just the interests of competitors and the wider marketplace that are damaged when barriers to effective interoperability are created. Such barriers can also damage the interests of education and training organization, learners, teachers and parents,” said Stephen Lucey, BECTA’s executive director for strategic technologies, also in a statement.
In April when ISO approved Microsoft’s standard in a most controversial vote, Becta registered its complaint:
The interests of non technical users (including most teachers and parents) would be best served by a single standard which accommodated the existing Open Document Format (ODF) specification, and any extensions necessary to provide the required compatibility with various legacy Microsoft formats.
In a report on Office 2007 and Vista, Becta recommended:
- No widespread deployment of Office 2007 should take place until schools and colleges are sure that they have in place mechanisms to deal with interoperability and potential digital divide issues set out in the report.
- To ensure widest compatibility of files between different applications, users of Office 2007 should not save any files in Microsoft’s new Office format (OOXML).
- Due to limitations in Microsoft’s implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) international standard, users should in the short term continue to save files in the more widely adopted .doc, .xls and .ppt formats.
