A little ingenuity and some smart developers...
…Go along way. And we see the results of such efforts paying off in a big way for the government of Massachusetts who decided earlier this week to leverage a new openDocument Format converter built for Microsoft Office. You may remember that, a few months ago, the state of Mass decided that the recently iso-certified OpenDocument file format would be used as the document default by state agencies - leading to speculation that the entire state government may migrate to another productivity tool such as Open Office. Now, for the purpose of this post, I will not get into the ROI or TCO issues related to such a migration (and there are plenty), but I will point out that the converter was noted by Louis Gutierrez – CIO of Massachusetts' Information Technology Division - as being “more economical and less disruptive to end users.(zdnet)”
The end result? Massachusetts gets an open file format to exchange and archive unstructured data (documents) while meeting the needs of its internal and external customers with a best of breed productivity tool. In this particular case, to clarify, accessibility limitations with non-Microsoft productivity tools caused concern for many users. As such, and for the time being, Massachusetts will keep Microsoft Office on its desktops.
Kudos to the folks participating in the sourceforge project for the ODF converter. Interested in checking out the project? Follow on http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter/
