It’s been a good week for open standards. Microsoft has announced it will directly support a range of standards-based document formats in a future update to its Office suite, and New York’s chief information officer issued a report calling for the state to embrace an open document policy.
The New-York report, called “A Strategy for Openness: Enhancing E-Records Access in New York State,” was cosponsored by CIO Melodie Mayberry-Stewart and state archivist Christine Ward and recommends legislative and executive action to support the state’s stated policy of “conduct(ing) its business in an open, interoperable and transparent manner.”
New York law requires officials to study how “electronic documents . . . can be created, maintained, exchanged and preserved.” The law also requires officials to take into account other states’ policies, guidelines for the state archives, the needs for public access, expected storage life, costs of implementation and potential savings.
Unlike the firestorm created in 2005 when Massachusetts promulgated regulations standardizing on the open source Open Document Format (ODF), New York’s recommendations are likely to cast it as a peace-maker, Peter O’Kelly, research director for the Burton Group, said.
“This is a very politically charged domain and a contentious debate,” O’Kelly said in a telephone interview. “The good news is there is a key shift is from proprietary and binary file formats to standards-based XML file formats,” he said. “That opens up a lot of new opportunities for people to unencumber themselves from vendor tie-ins.”
The CIO’s report specifically cautioned against nominating specific technologies as state document standards. “The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated,” the report said.
The report noted that, “In the office suite format debate, there currently is no compelling solution for the State’s…