Australia Mandates Microsoft's Office Open XML 317
littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions."
Re:Down under is going down, down, down (Score:2, Informative)
I wonder if this is at ends with australian government themselves, given that they're following a standard which is not implemented?
Public information should be open (Score:5, Informative)
As long as they provide information to the public in an open format such as HTML or PDF, I don't care what they adopt in an SOE.
The major beef I do have however, is the Windows only tax return software provided by the Australian Taxation Office. The fact that I have to use Windows if I want to file my tax return electronically is totally unacceptable.
Re:It just doesn't end (Score:4, Informative)
How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks?
Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?
I have worked with companies and governments that try to implement various restrictions to stop employees taking data out of the organisation...
I have found that:
The restrictions are generally flawed (often the fault of ms for flawed implementation) and people can get round them easily.
The restrictions only serve to hinder people's ability to work.
Windows typically requires expensive additional software, eg software to prevent access to USB storage devices, and when this software crashes the underlying os allows the unwanted devices anyway.
Even if the restrictions work, there are other ways, eg taking photographs of the screen, printing stuff out, stealing the internal hdd from the machine etc...
You place restrictions on removable media, uploads to the web, attachments via email, people will just find another way... It's better to log rather than to restrict, because if there are no restrictions people will often pick the easiest route and you can at least catch them in the act, and everyone else can get on with their work unhindered.
When implementing security policy, people only tend to think about the front door, they concentrate on features rather than implementation... They buy all kinds of junk claiming to support fancy sounding buzzwords not realising that there are often ways around all of this stuff...
I saw a system where someone was using a web based application to keep data of different security classifications and belonging to different customers separated, now sure if you go through the web interface it won't let you access other people's data but if you get access to the underlying server you obviously have access to everything... And yet, people were claiming that an admin on the server wouldn't be able to access the data because they cant do so through the web interface!
Re:I keep seeing... (Score:5, Informative)
Not even MS Office is able to write OOXML as in ECMA-376:
Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
(emphasis mine) [source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179190.aspx [microsoft.com] ]
Re:does office even support the standard? (Score:4, Informative)
Office 2010 supports only ECMA-376 read support. Read/Write support is for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and they claim to be able to read ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
Re:But people in the US should thank them.... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they are now required not to pay the Microsoft Tax. The last tests I saw showed that Microsoft Office got over 5,000 failures in Microsoft's own OOXML conformance tests. It therefore does not support OOXML and can therefore not be used by the Australian government. I suggest that anyone in Australia points this out to their elected representatives.
Amusingly, Microsoft Office actually did better in ODF conformance tests (with a plugin, I think), than it did in OOXML conformance tests. I'm not sure how OO.o does with OOXML, but it's managed to open both of the the OOXML files I've ever been sent.