Document standards row heats up

The EU wants to ensure open standards in electronic documents

Standards body the Open Document Format (ODF) Alliance closed ranks with the European Commission (EC) against Microsoft today, issuing a statement applauding the commission's vociferous endorsement of the ODF standard in an effort to avoid vendor lock-in on document formats.

Earlier this week, the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, Neelie Kroes, warned against the harmful effects that governments could face if they found themselves locked in to single-vendor document formats, a veiled swipe at the Microsoft Office 7 application suite.

The ODF document format is used by many EU government and academic institutions, as it is widely supported by open source and free software.

And the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has already filed a complaint with the EC criticising Microsoft Office 7 for not supporting open standards such as ODF.

"The end is near for the era of public information being locked-in a closed format," said Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance, in a statement.

Microsoft has promised that its forthcoming Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will add support for the ODF 1.1 standard, but this will not be available until the first half of next year at the earliest. Meanwhile, the software giant continues to push the rival Office Open XML standard as an alternative.