Massachusetts Directive Bypasses Office XML

Massachusetts has approved guidelines that could eliminate Microsoft Office as an approved application for state government purchase. The guidelines require that all applications be capable of saving data in either the Open Document Format, a license-free XML format, or in Adobe’s Portable Document Format, capabilities that Microsoft has only begun to consider adding to Office. Although the loss of Massachusetts as an Office customer would have only a minor financial impact, if duplicated elsewhere it could affect other elements of Microsoft’s desktop strategy and force customers and partners to adopt alternatives to Office in order to work with government agencies.

Open Document Formats

The Massachusetts decision on file formats is a small part of a much larger IT initiative, called the Enterprise Information Technology Architecture, and accompanying guidelines called the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM). The model also outlines other components of a system architecture for access to government data by the public and other agencies, covering interoperability, application design, integration services, systems management, and security. The ETRM is based on an Enterprise Architecture Toolkit developed by an association of state chief information officers and a U.S. federal government enterprise architecture initiative.