OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance)

Alliance Formed to Promote Improved Access to and Retrieval of Electronic Government Documents

ODF Alliance Includes Diverse Industry Partners, Associations, NGOs and aCademic/Research Institutions

Washington DC, USA. March 3, 2006.

As documents and services are increasingly transformed from paper to electronic form, there is growing recognition that governments and their constituents may not be able to access, retrieve and use critical records, information and documents in the future. A broad cross-section of associations, academic institutions, industry and related groups today joined together to form the OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), an organization dedicated to promoting open solutions to this problem.

As technologies rapidly evolve, documents are created by public sector agencies using different applications that may not be compatible with one another today, let alone into the future. Through the use of a truly open standard file format that can be implemented by numerous and varied applications, the Alliance seeks to enable governments and their constituents to use, access and store critical documents, records and information both today and in the future, independent of the applications or enterprise platforms used for their creation or future access.

Specifically, the ODF Alliance supports the use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open XML-based collection of office document formats, including text, presentation and spreadsheet formats. ODF, the only established open standard document format, enables the retrieval of information and exchange of documents between different applications, agencies and/or business partners in a platform and application independent way.

"With a broad cross section of support, the ODF Alliance will work to enable governments around the world to have greater control over and direct management of their documents, now and forever," said Ken Wasch, President of the Software & Information Industry Association, a leading member of the Alliance and the principal trade association of the software and digital content industry. "There's no doubt that the momentum of ODF is gaining traction worldwide as more people every day are discovering that it's a better way to preserve and access documents."

The ODF Alliance was formed by a diverse coalition of more than 35 organizations from a wide range of countries around the world. The Alliance membership includes: Adullact Association; American Library Association; Ark Linux; The Association of Open Source Suppliers and Vendors in Denmark; Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (India); Cognitran Ltd; Corel Corporation; CSW Group Ltd; EDS; EMC Corporation; Friends of OpenDocument, Inc.; GENICORP; Indian Institute of Technology (IIT); Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for the City of Vienna; IBM; Information Program, Open Society Institute; International Open Source Network; Justsystem Corporation; Massachusetts High Tech Council; Massachusetts Network Communications Council; Novell; Open Society Archives of the Central European University (OSA Archivum); OpenForum Europe; OpenDocument Fellowship; The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc.; OpenOffice.org; Opera Software; Optaros, Inc.; Oracle Corporation; OSS Alliance; Propylon Ltd; Red Hat, Inc.; Software & Information Industry Association; Sun Microsystems; the Technical University of Denmark and tarent GmbH. More information about the Alliance is available on the Alliance webs site at: http://www.odfalliance.org.

The Alliance is building support globally for use and recognition of ODF, and all organizations that share its goals are welcomed to join the effort. Organizations can join by visiting the Alliance web site at: http://www.odfalliance.org/join.asp.

In recent months, jurisdictions such as the State of Massachusetts in the United States and others around the world are leading the way, by embracing open document formats. According to recent press reports, 13 nations globally are considering adoption of the OpenDocument format.

Contact

Press Inquiries
Jim Hock
Tel: +1 202-587-4782
Email: Jim.Hock@463.com

Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See: (1) General references in Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument); (2) the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC.

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