Australian Government Denies Microsoft Bias In OOXML Choice 193
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the Australian Government is not taking criticism of its decision to mandate Microsoft's Office Open XML standard lying down. 'The policy is vendor-neutral which allows its principles and standards to be used across any platform,' they said this week. Yup ... except for the fact that almost no other office suite apart from Microsoft Office supports writing to the standard. And as for Firefox? Turns out 96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer. Looks like bureaucracy is winning here."
No bias at all. (Score:5, Interesting)
The others could support the standard. Or they could eat cake.
What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it? Moreover, what kind of "openness" is it if the single vendor is also the issuer of the standard?
No bias, my gluteus maximus...
Regarding IE (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a major Australian Government department. The summary comment about how "96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer" should not be a surprise to anyone - it's the mandated platform for nearly all corporations these days, at least here and in the US. If Firefox had some OFFICIAL support for things like Group Policies and MSI package deployment (and I'm not referring to those hacks and repackaged releases you can find at certain places on the net), then maybe there would be an increase in the level of corporate uptake of the browser. As an engineer and not a lowly secretary for example, I'm able to have both Firefox and IE on the same machine. Shit I can have nearly anything on my computer, so long as it's legal of course (thank goodness for open-source). There was a lot of tweaking to get Firefox to accept NTLM authentication which is normally passed through into IE automatically (hence a lot of poking about with the network.automatic-ntlm-auth.* settings in about:config), but it works quite well in the end except for some peculiar pages.
My point is that whoever wrote the summary has probably never worked in the IT department of a company which has to suppose thousands of desktops. There's a reason Active Directory and by extension Group Policy is so useful, and hence why IE is a standard on said desktops, and it ain't about bureaucracy. As for Microsoft's Open Office XML... well, we apparently use a TON of .doc files where a nice PDF would have been more appropriate, so a cultural shift to more open standards was never going to happen quickly anyway.
Re:Regarding IE (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been managing Firefox through Active Directory for a couple of years now with FirefoxADM.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefoxadm/ [sourceforge.net]
It doesn't require a strange build of firefox. I manage proxy settings for the domain with the ADM templates and update Firefox on the clients with standard mozilla.com builds of Firefox. I don't know if it is OFFICIAL enough for you but it has proven effective here in letting Firefox work just as transparently as IE with AD and our proxies.
Re:Regarding IE (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks nice, but it would never pass muster with those who set IT policy unfortunately. From the looks of it, it doesn't seem to be an officially authorized, Mozilla-endorsed set of templates for which Mozilla themselves can be held responsible if something fucks up (no need to mention the fallacy of believing this means anything in practice of course, but the lawmakers like to know they can shift the blame to someone). I imagine the software probably works quite well, however the 3rd-party nature of it is still a strike against it.
In the end, it's also yet another thing IT need to support which won't have a measurable improvement over something that's already built into the system, integrated and updated using pre-existing infrastructure with a very large amount of knowledgebase to fall back on. Governments are rather boring to work with when it comes to IT. :)
Re:I want to believe (Score:5, Interesting)
I hear ya man. I worked at uni that went from an awesomely diverse mix of mac, pcs, linux & unix desktops to a nearly total microsoft takeover. What orgs like microsoft , dell, oracle & cisco tend to do is force universities to sign exclusivity contracts that stop them from making purchases from competitors. I mean sure cisco stuff is great, but when we want to just stick a 4 port in the photocopier room to make a little room for an extra terminal, it sucks having the dept told we cant spend $80 on a little d-link switch and instead had to blow hundreds on some overpriced cisco thing that was far overspecced for our needs because some prick in a suit and no idea of the implications signed an exclusivity contract. Even worse when our old 3COM router rack was forced to be dismantled and replaced with a hideously expensive cisco thing because the compliance officer took a shit when he discovered the perfectly reliable rack of unix+3com gear.
I felt really bad for the physics + chem guys who where getting denied unix workstations to run software that could ONLY run on unix because of these deals. I know at one point the dept actually threatened to unplug from the network and get a private fibre link to completely dissociate themselves from the university. Watching lawyers INTERNALLY battle is bizzare.
And yeah, we knew it was all over when our beautifully functional Solaris mail servers where replaced with exchange crap , requiring a grand total of 2x solaris servers servicing 10K+ students perfectly with a rack of about 10 exchange servers that NEVER where able to cope with the load. What a waste of good money.
And yeah, I knew my time was up when I was told my beloved Netware servers time was up. Good night sweet prince and hello private industry. Not sure I made the right decision though.
Re:Why should they change? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm curious. How do you plan to create a clean-room implementation of an interoperable ODF using office suite when ODF doesn't specify things as important as how spreadsheet formulas are specified?
Who is taking the bribes then? (Score:5, Interesting)
So exactly which politician is taking the M$ bribes then? Come on, name and shame time.
Sticking with MSIE is just dependence on an archaic IT infrastructure, and no respect for security, but forcing the use of OOXML just makes no sense other than for vendor lock-in.
Re:I want to believe (Score:5, Interesting)