Trade Group Blasts Massachusetts Call For Office Plug-InTrade Group Blasts Massachusetts Call For Office Plug-In

A trade association has blasted the Massachusetts Information and Technology Division (IDT) for requesting a plug-in for Microsoft's Office Suite, seizing on the issue as evidence that the state's policy of mandating the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is "a biased, open source-only preference policy."

The request for proposal (RFP) was posted last Wednesday but the OpenDocument Foundation Inc. said two days later that it has such a plug-in and it will be submitted soon to the IDT.

Late Monday, Melanie Wyne, executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), said in a statement: "The RFP reveals that the choice presented by the previous ITD bureaucrats " i.e., ODF-compliant desktops for state agencies are the only viable options for citizens to have access to their data in the future " was purposely exclusionary, being primarily designed to distort the competitive landscape.

"In other words, it had little to do with access to documents, and everything to do with excluding proprietary software providers."

The ISC is a unit of CompTIA, which has supported Microsoft in its ongoing battles over the Massachusetts policy and, more recently, in the software giant's struggles with regulators in the European Union.

Wyne noted that "other governments" have closely followed the Massachusetts policy, which mandates that the state's documents be preserved in ODF starting in January. She railed away at what she called "a specious administrative process" that led to the mandate in Massachusetts complaining that the policy was really "an open source-only objective."

The IDT last updated the RFP last Wednesday.

Wyne observed that the issue is also important in Europe where EU regulators have not promoted ODF-compliant standards.

Microsoft is scheduled to release its Office 2007 version in January at about the same time Massachusetts is committed to implement the ODF-only policy. However, Microsoft is expected to try again with Massachusetts state officials after it receives expected approval for its new office software from the ECMA European standards body.