BECTA, the agency that governs educational technology in the U.K. has filed a formal complaint against Microsoft with the European Union.
“In the context of the education system,” lack of truly open standards in Office 2007 “can result in higher prices and a range of other unsatisfactory effects,” BECTA said in a statement.
In a report on Office 2007 and Vista, Becta recommended:
* No widespread deployment of Office 2007 should take place until schools and colleges are sure that they have in place mechanisms to deal with interoperability and potential digital divide issues set out in the report.
* To ensure widest compatibility of files between different applications, users of Office 2007 should not save any files in Microsoft’s new Office format (OOXML).
* Due to limitations in Microsoft’s implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) international standard, users should in the short term continue to save files in the more widely adopted .doc, .xls and .ppt formats.
Related: Petition for ODF at the National Archive
4 comments:
Microsoft Office 2007 was one of the first things to get booted off my new laptop since it was only a trial version.
We have enough problems with it at the local library computer lab, which isn't upgraded to it. But patrons come in with docs from home to print or whatnot and can't because of it.
Get the library to switch to OpenOffice.org and tell the patrons it's either they come in with odf files or they don't print. Say no to M$ Office.
Much as I'd love to bring that hammer down, thanks to the dumb way our local government works, if the guys in county IT can't/won't change it doesn't get changed at the lower level. :(
Red tape and fear do a lot to keep M$ entrenched here.
Such people are best voted out.
Post a Comment