Last year, i wrote about When Will Indonesia Use ODF? Up to now, we still don't have any standard for document format. Do you think .doc or .docx is a standard? Well, think again, as it's not an official standard in Indonesia as it hasn't been approved by the National Standarization Agency of Indonesia. As a de factor standard yes, not not by de jure.
This morning, i had some opportunity to discuss this issue with Betti Alisjahbana, ex president director of IBM Indonesia, which is now head of AOSI (Indonesian Open Source Association). Her team has been aware of this issue and they have started to move on to make ODF as the standard for office document format. The process might take some time, but at least, there is a significant progress since AOSI was born last year.
Other countries have taken same steps and some of them have made it. Take an example of Malaysia who have used ODF as a national standard for two years (since 2007). Another example are Sweden, South Africa, Venezuela, and Korea (more countries can be searched via Google).
By having ODF as a national standards, adoption of Open Source application, mainly OpenOffice for office suite category will be lot easier as it (currently) one of the many Open Source application which fully supports ODF standards.
In OOo 3.x, it has supported up to ODF 1.2 and it's aiming for better support in OOo 3.2 which is scheduled on November 2009.
IMHO,
ReplyDeleteAlthough Doc is not standardized by BSN, we can not say Doc is just only de-facto standard.
We should take account position of BSN that deals with national standard.
Below this level, there can be regional or departmental or agency or company standard.
When some regional / department / agency / company officially required the document in Doc format, then Doc has de-jure standard for that level.
For example, my company has officially defined Microsoft Office 97 format as company document format standard.
And AFAIK, Doc, xls, and also mpp (microsoft project) has been officially required during government tender process.
If you look at the definition of de jure, it means concerning law, not by fact. So, in your case, it's still considered as de-facto (probably because you don't use OpenOffice.org, so your office use MSO 97 format).
ReplyDeletempp probably used due to no other player who works on this category, but in word processing and spreadsheets, there has been an international standards (ODF) which has been approved by ISO. This makes some differences