All downloads were PDF only. I refer to rob’s point – conversion to ODF is not that difficult, and there should be some progress by now even for institutions as large an unwieldy as the government.

The National Archives of Australia have created Xena (http://xena.sourceforge.net/) to tackle conversions for them.

Rest assured that I am very sorry for the gender over-sight. My humble apologies. And thank you for the correction.

As to the purpose of the conference relative to making progress implementing ODF, the conference is very important. The countries that have stood against OOXML and the all too easily corrupted process of I$O should hopefully be energized to stand against Microsoft. We have all seen first-hand how unethical Microsoft and certain elected/appointed officials are. This conference is a way for the countries and people that resisted to network and provide encouragement to others to resist the influence of Microsoft.

Talk people. Collaborate. Share knowledge. Support one another.

Using MS’s products is short-term thinking. It’s very simply pay them now AND later or, if you don’t pay them now, you’ll pay even more later. There is no negotiating with them once they’ve established themselves within your infrastructure. Then you’ll also be subject to MS’s interpretation of standards and their idea of quality software.

Microsoft in South Africa is a powerful competitor for government business but I believe – knowing a bit about what’s happening inside the government, is that this is more of an economic than a document interchange issue.

Note that the Rand has depreciated from 7 to almost 12 on the US Dollar since last June. The act of adopting ODF is also an endorsement for Open Office and perhaps even Ubuntu – both excellent, free Open Source products..

Danny Lieberman

However I think that the initial question (what has been the progress) is worth asking since this (Tectonic Oct24 2007) is “the time line of the MIOS document’s implementation. It entails four steps:

1. Ensuring all people working in government departments can view ODF documents. This will likely be done through the use of converters and will be completed by March 2008.

2. To supply all government published government documents in ODF or other non-proprietary formats. Although he did not specify a date, he aimed for this to be completed by the end of 2008.

3. All internal government documents to be produced as ODF. This is not likely to be completed within the next year, but should be done by March 2009.

4. The final phase would see the conversion of all legacy documents to ODF or other non-proprietary formats.”

Nice to know if it is still on track since even this is stll behind the target dates sent to the DGs by SITA (still on the SITA site in tif format!)

There are people within government that have done an enormous amount of work to get to even this point. We all wish it was easier, but it’s not.

Converting to ODF is not hard – just load the SUN ODF plugin into Word and then save your docs as .ODF (in fact set that as your default). Then include the link http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/index.jsp whenever you send out your documents

But hey where is the political capital it that – why not have a conference and make some noise instead of actually doing it.