IT-Politisk Forening

The expert group already used by the parliament will act as standard forum that will recommend new standards for approval by the ministry, but only document standards (editable documents, PDF used for non-editable).

The list is currently empty, but ODF is mentioned in the agreement in parliament as a mandatory standard, so it should get onto the list very soon.

The problem is, of course that the expert group have not yet established itself as a standards forum. And that having a list just for documents invites to have several document standards. And Microsoft took that invitation, claiming that they fulfill all criterias to be on the list.

The criterias are:

Fully documented and accessible

Freely implementable

Approved by international standard organization, e.g., ISO, standardized and maintained in an open process.

It will be very interested to see if the expert group will actually evaluate the OOXML standardization process. Previously they have just relied on a report from a consultant agency, Devoteam, that only evaluated standard organizations, not standards, and found that all organization were relatively open.

It has to be demonstrated that the whole standard can be implemented by everyone on multiple platforms.

The opposition believes that this excludes the current MS Office implementation of OOXML:TRANSITIONAL Microsoft and the government party, Venstre, believes that it can be demonstrated that all of OOXML can be implemented without actually implementing OOXML:Strict on even one platform. Of course that would mean that powerpoint and hand-waving could put OOXML on the list even if every implementation only supports TRANSITIONAL

It has to be interoperable with other standards on the list within certain functionalities.

This can also be very tricky.