The Open Document Format, ODF, is gaining some momentum lately. The European Union, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Belgium, , Norway, and Denmark have all recent adopted ODF. Denmark officials believe that the country will save nearly $100,000,000USD by adopting Open Document Format, and OpenOffice.

The decision in Massachusetts to move to ODF was at first assumed to be a move from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, however, Massachusetts officials have recently made it known that for now they will stay with Microsoft Office with a plugin to support ODF. It will be interesting to see to what degree OpenOffice is implemented in the near and long term.

I think it's great that an organization has developed an open set of document standards, and is now being successful in seeing it achieve some adoption. Office Suites with support for proprietary formats only are quickly going to become a thing of the past. Whether or not the free office suite solutions like OpenOffice and NeoOffice can make a dent in the Microsoft Office dominance is the question. Recent activity indicates that they will. Additionally there are more and more online office suites cropping up which put even more pressure on Microsoft Office.


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