Noted IT industry analyst, Dr Kevin McIsaac, predicts that MIcrosoft Office will give way to open source products as governments and other large organisations move to open standards for storing documents.

According to Dr McIsaac, the US state of Massachusetts' policy that by 2007 all Executive Department documents must be stored in Open Document Format (ODF) or PDF is a significant milestone in the migration from proprietary systems to open standards.

Dr McIsaac says it is founded in the belief that open standards are the best option for ensuring that official public records are freely and openly available for their full lifecycle. Experience with other open standards (ASCII, TCP/IP, SQL, HTML) demonstrates their power, longevity and interoperability, confirming this belief, according to Dr McIsaac.

ODF is supported by a wide range of free and commercial applications (i.e., OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, Abiword, eZ publish, IBM Workplace, Knomos case management, Scribus DTP, TextMaker and Visioo Writer) with Microsoft the notable exception. According to Dr McIsaac, Microsoft will resist ODF in an attempt to maintain control over a critical standard in one of its most profitable product lines. However, like other open standards before it, and for similar reasons, ODF will become the common standard for office documents, though due to the ubiquity of Microsoft formats this may take 6-8 years.

Dr McIsaac recommends that organisations with statutory requirements for information availability should review Massachusetts' Enterprise Technical Reference Model for insights in how to deal with this challenge. All other organisations should watch the ODF and wait until the next round of application upgrades (probably triggered by Microsoft Office 12) before making any decisions on formats and potentially new applications.

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