Remember all that hoopla between Microsoft and the UK government on adopting the ODF standard for documents last year? Well, it seems like we finally have a resolution of the issue.
Read up on that here.
Basically, upon pressure by the UK government, Microsoft has decided to support the Open Document Format in its cloud based productivity suite, and Office 365 customers can now export their documents in the ODF format.
This, after months upon months of negotiations with the UK government.
Microsoft was pushing for the XML standard, but this comment from the company tells it straight:
“While we already have great ODF support in O365, we’ve worked with GDS to understand the need to be able to create or import a document in another format and export it as ODF 1.2 and will be rolling out this new functionality to Office 365 in May.
These changes ensure that Microsoft Office 365 will be compliant with the policy for sharing and collaborating on government documents and available for all public sector organizations.”
Seems like Microsoft was not at all pleased with the ODF adoption.
But while the company may not be the biggest proponent of this, and company executives even criticized government officials for not supporting both the XML and ODF standards, this at least ensures that people that do not have access to Office products will still have flexibility.
People and organizations, both.
