[LINK] Australian Whole-of-Government Common Operating Environment

[Tom Worthington]

The Australian Department of Finance and Deregulation, has issued a
"Whole-of-Government Common Operating Environment Policy" (WofG COE):
<http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/strategy-and-governance/docs/wofg_coe_policy.pdf>.

The most controversial part of this is the mandating of the Office Open
XML file format (as used by Microsoft Office):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML>.

The rival Open Document Format, as used by OpenOffice.org and other 
office packages, is not mentioned in the COE:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument>.

National Archives of Australia developed its Xena open source archiving 
software to convert documents to ODF format for electronic archiving: 
<http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/xena/index.php?title=Frequently_Asked_Questions>.

Unless Archives decides to change the format used, each document will
need to be converted from OOXML to ODF for long term storage. Prudence 
requires the original version of a document to be kept, along with the 
converted version, so this will increase the amount of storage needed.

However, what might be more significant is the lack of web standards
from the COE. An "Internet Browser" is included as a standard
application, but there are no versions of web document formats mandated,
such as HTML or CSS. Also there is no mention of ebooks.

In my view the use of office applications suites, be they producing
OOXML or ODF, are of questionable value. These applications encourage
authors to create poorly structured, hard to read documents which waste
system resources.

The COE also specifies the ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008 version of PDF
(equivalent to Adobe PDF 1.7): 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format>.

The "Australian Government’s study into the Accessibility of the 
Portable Document Format for people with a disability" recommended the 
continued use of alternate formats to PDF: 
<http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/pdf-accessibility-study/>.

In my view packaged web formats such as the ePub ebook format, would be 
preferable to PDF .


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra