Mass. to dump MS OFFICE applications....

The commonwealth of Massachusetts has proposed a plan to phase out office productivity applications from Microsoft and other providers in favor of those based on "open" standards, including the recently approved OpenDocument standard.

The state described the plan in a posting made to its Web site earlier this week as part of a public review process which ends Sept. 9. Massachusetts agencies have until Jan. 1, 2007, to install applications that support the OpenDocument file formats and phase out other products.

By then, agencies must have applications that save documents in that format by default. Massachusetts will also sanction use of Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format (PDF) format, which it says "meet(s) criteria of openness and (is) therefore considered acceptable at this time." Documents need to adhere to a version of PDF that supports XML.