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Meet UK Government open standards mandates with Microsoft Office

Last week the Open Standards Board  adopted .ICS files (RFC 5545) and vCard files (RFC 6350) as open standards for UK government. What does that mean for your office? How will you adapt to these changes? The good news is, if you’re using Microsoft Office, these new standards are already supported.

Microsoft Office is the most popular productivity solution on the market supporting both these standards. In fact, Microsoft technologies have supported these standards for many years. Microsoft participated in the consultation process for these standards and fully supports this decision.

Microsoft Office 2013 and Microsoft Office 365 also support the UK Government’s recent mandate of Open Document Format (ODF) files. Office 365 is the only cloud productivity solution that supports ODF 1.2 and has the security accreditation to handle OFFICIAL-level government documents.

Most government customers today are already using or have access to Office 2013. Setting up Office 2013 to default to using ODF 1.2 is a simple configuration exercise using Group Policy. Microsoft recently published a guide for administrators, with step-by-step instructions for achieving this. Microsoft Office 365 also fully supports working on documents in the cloud in ODF format, and can export Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in ODT, ODS and ODP formats, respectively.

Microsoft Office makes it easy to comply with government file mandates with the technology you already use. Learn more.