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Alliance Weighs In on Microsoft Interoperability in Education
5/19/2008
[Editor's note: Updated information on this topic can be found in our article "Microsoft To Adopt ODF, Take Role in Format Development," available here. --D.N.]
As we reported last week, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), a group that advises the British government on education technology issues, referred a complaint to the European Commission about the impact of Microsoft's interoperability issues in education. Now the ODF (OpenDocument Format) Alliance is stepping in with support for Becta's move. Microsoft, for its part, responded today by saying that it wholly supports interoperability and will work to resolve the issues raised by the groups.
At issue for Becta is Microsoft's support for its own Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in Office 2007 at the expense of comparable support for ODF. Both formats have been approved as ISO/IEC standards, with Microsoft's OOXML gaining ratification just last month. ODF is supported by competitors of Microsoft, including IBM and Sun.
Last Monday, Becta released a statement announcing its move to bring the issue to the attention of the EC, saying, "Becta believes that impediments to interoperability limit choice. In the context of the education system this can result in higher prices and a range of other unsatisfactory effects which have a negative impact on wider policy initiatives, including improving educational outcomes, facilitating home school links and addressing the digital divide."
The EC has been leading its own investigation into Microsoft interoperability in relation to anti-competitiveness issues since January of this year.
In response to last week's action by Becta, the ODF Alliance's managing director, Marino Marcich, released the following statement today: "That a major government agency, in this case the UK Government's lead agency for information and communications technology (ICT) in education, felt compelled to take such an action demonstrates that the wider marketplace, which includes educational and training organizations, libraries and archival institutions, will be adversely impacted by OOXML's impediments to interoperability. We have repeatedly urged Microsoft to provide native, built-in support for the truly open ODF document standard, as [Becta] has suggested."
Becta also went so far as to recommend against the adoption of Office 2007 (and Vista) by educational institutions in a report it issued in January.
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