Posts tagged office_documents

On the radio: Sutor, Munk and Gøtze

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5 years ago
by John Gøtze in

During Bob Sutor’s visit in Copenhagen (I posted the homemade video with Bob Sutor the other day), I had organised for him to be interviewed by DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation, national public radio).

Tonight, DR brought the interview with Bob in their program Harddisken (third section), with an almost half-hour long theme about open standards hosted by Henrik Føhns. He had invited me in the studio for comments and debate with Marie Munk, Deputy Director General in the National IT and Telecom Agency. Bob apprears in edited and partly-translated form, but Marie and I were live on the air (and didn’t get to hear Bob!). So, it was there and then. Afterwards, of course – oh, why didn’t I say this and that, and all that, but it was also fun being live.
The whole show is now downloadable as a podcast — the Harddisken podcast-feed should reach 10.000 users, I was told, and is the third most used podcast of all in DR. Go get the podcast and help Harddisken become the most downloaded podcast! (of course, it’s in Danish, but the music is great ;-) – and Bob does get a bit of airtime, which of course is in English). About two-thirds into the MP3-file.

Since I cannot get DRs online radio and their fancy DRPlayer to work in my system (Mac OSX, Firefox) I chose not to link to those services here … but want to say to DR: Thank you for the podcasts!

Bob Sutor in First Life, Copenhagen

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5 years ago
by John Gøtze in , ,

Bob Sutor is in Copenhagen, and will give a public lecture at the IT University at 5pm today, Wednesday. He’ll talk about what’s going on with open standards and why it’s important, also to IT students. I’ve reserved the big lecture hall (Aud 1), and everyone is welcome to join us.

I’m certain that Bob will talk about the situation around document formats, where a lot is happening. Just covering the past couple of days’ events around the standards is a talk in itself: It’s clear now (!) that many standards bodies point to contradictions around Ecma Office Open XML and its submission to ISO, so the fast-track for Microsoft’s Office 2007 format becoming a standard is slowed down (at least, if not stopped?). In other news, two more US states gives more momentum to OpenDocument, and ODF passes yet another maturity signpost as ODF 1.1 is now an OASIS Standard.

Over at my Danmark 2.0 blog, I have suggested that the newly formed S-142/U-34 Danish Standards mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 34 spend their time on making ODF a Danish Standard. That would be kind of ironic with all those Microsoft Gold Partners in the group, I know, but none the less, I’m deadly serious about the proposal!

Belgium Jumps On The ODF Wagon

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5 years ago
by John Gøtze in , ,

I have been inspired by BELGIF for a while, but here is somethig that puts Belgium on The ODF Map:
Dominique Deckmyn of ZDNet reports (same here) some very interesting news from Belgium:

“In a blow to Microsoft, Belgium’s government departments will be instructed to use an open file format for internal communications.”

There is a press announcement from the Belgian Council of Ministers about “Use of open standards for the exchange of office documents”. The announcement is available in only French and Dutch, none of which are languages I am very proficient in, but as far as I can tell, the decision proposed by Mr. Peter Vanvelthoven, Minister for Employment and Computerization, was made Friday by the Council of Ministers, and essentially says:

“All federal government agencies must from September 2007 ensure that they can receive and read ODF documents. This does not exclude the use of other formats. It is up to each agency to determine the way in which the functionality of reading is guaranteed.

Depending on the results of an impact analysis carried out by Fedict, ODF will from September 2008 be the standard format used for the exchange of office documents.”

Someone who speaks French or Dutch, please verify my translation.

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