French administration opts for OpenOffice
By 2007, over 400 000 computer workstations in the French central administration will be using the OpenOffice2 office suite. This massive migration towards an Open Document Format (ODF) is being supported by a wide range of training activities for administrative personnel. Last December, an interministerial working group defined a certain number of actions to be taken in relation to the ongoing development of computer workstations in public administration and an evolution towards the OpenOffice2 office suite and the Open Document format.Five months later, the groundwork for this migration has been laid. Administrations now have at their disposable a number of tools to assist them in their migration to OpenOffice 2: a CD-ROM for the installation of OpenOffice2, a training pack, on-line training assistance, a communications pack, various support tools, guidelines, etc.France’s newly formed Directorate General for the Modernisation of the State (Direction Générale de la Modernisation de l’Etat - DGME), in operation since January 2006, is responsible for this action. The move towards ODF by the French public administration echoes recent initiatives in Belgium and Denmark signalling the official adoption of ODF.
ODF was adopted as an ISO standard in May 2006 and was developed from the format initially used in Sun Microsystems Inc’s StarOffice and the open source OpenOffice.org.
