Analysis: MA, MS At It Again Over OfficeAnalysis: MA, MS At It Again Over Office

The off-again-on-again David-and-Goliath fight over Office file formats between Microsoft and the State of Massachusetts is on again this week, as a state agency, the Information Technology Division, issued a draft report that recommended the state adopt the OpenDocument formats for all its documents -- and stop buying software that doesn't provide that format.

Microsoft has already fired back, with one Microsoft official calling OpenDocument an inferior file format. From the Redmond, WA, company's perspective the argument could hardly come at a worse time, just as it gets ready to showcase Microsoft Office 12, due the second half of next year, at next week's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. The dust-up began in 2003, when Eric Kriss, Secretary, Administration & Finance of Massachusetts, promoted an "Open Standards, Open Source" policy for state software purchases. His aim was mostly to alleviate the incompatability problems caused by different software packages and versions, which, as in any large enterprise make it difficult to exchange information and read archives -- and at least a little bit to promote the state's own software industry, where the Open Source movement had its beginnings at MIT.

(OpenDocument, an XML-based format, is used by OpenOffice, the freeware office suite, and Sun Microsystems' StarOffice. The OpenDocument format is an approved OASIS standard that describes file formats for text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. The FAQ makes interesting reading.)

Microsoft Goes 'Open' for Office
Kriss appeared to give Microsoft some wiggle room in January of this year when he modified "open standards" to "open formats." In a speech to the Massachusetts Software Council, an industry-booster group, he said: "Open Formats are specifications for data file formats based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community, and affirmed by a standards body; or de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms. An example is TXT text and PDF document files."

The change appeared to be a compromise with Microsoft, which had, for its part, announced it would license a patent it held on the use of XML to define the schema of DOC files in Microsoft Office 2003. The key seemed to be the phrase "perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms."

Microsoft announced, "We were pleased to work with the Commonwealth on its new policy, and that policy recognizes several open document formats, including Microsoft WordprocessingML," the software firm said in a statement responding to questions from TechWeb.com. "What the Commonwealth is saying is that the XML in Office makes our products an acceptable choice for achieving data exchange in public-sector IT-systems."

Kriss said in his speech that the Microsoft formats were likely to be included in the list of "open formats" supported by his policy, and Microsoft probably felt like it had dodged a bullet.

This week with the draft report, however, Massachusetts took another shot.

The gist of the IT Division's draft position (which isn't yet official, it's just entering a public-comment phase) seems to be that the state actually meant what it originally said: open standards for document formats, specifically the OpenDocument format and PDF, should become the official standards of the state government, and only products that produce documents in those formats should be approved for purchase by state agencies.

"Desktop software that supports OpenDocument and PDF in the future is acceptable; Microsoft's proprietary XML formats are not," Kriss told CRN's Paula Rooney. "Microsoft could put capabilities within their XML Office suite right now to open, save and manipulate OpenDocument formats. It is certainly is something they could do. "

Microsoft predictably will have no part of open standards. Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Business Strategy, told Rooney he does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies."

This kind of techier-than-thou argument is the sort of thing Microsoft is supremely good at, but Yates and company may find that they're up against a new level of competition when they try to take on politicians in Masschusetts, a state where the game is always hardball.

"We have gone through extensive review and we believe were the best at understanding our own needs," Kriss told Rooney. "Microsoft is free to express opinions about the technology value but for our needs the document outlines what we believe."