[Scribus] Massachusetts chooses OASIS as standard file format for state gouvernment

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi all,

this one isn't directly related to scribus, but it's quite interesting 
anyway:

From: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/42442/index.html

"The State of Massachusetts -- home of The Boston Tea Party, The Battle 
of Dorchester Heights and other underdog victories -- today released the 
draft document (for review & comment up until September 9) which would 
be the basis of the State's policy on acceptable document file formats.

Among other information standards issues covered in the document, 
Massachusetts declares the following formats to be the targets of 
migration policies:
-OASIS OpenDocument for Text, Spreadsheet & Presentation files (.odt, 
.ods, .odp) Migration Target: January 1, 2007
-Plain Text Format for Text files (.txt)
-Hypertext Document Format for Web Pages (.html)
-Portable Document Format for Other Documents (.pdf)

Among the applications supporting OpenDocument are OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 
and 2.0, StarOffice 8, KOffice 1.4, Workplace as well as, to some 
partial degree, AbiWord, eZ publish, Knomos, Scribus and TextMaker. 
Others will follow."

...

"From Peter Quinn, Chief Information Officer, The Commonwealth of 
Massachusetts...
'We just published a new draft version of our Enterprise Technical 
Reference Model for public review available at www.mass.gov/itd (see 
feature story in the center of the page). The revised version of the 
Data Formats section begins on page 16 and identifies the newly ratified 
OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as our 
standard for office documents. Additional open and acceptable formats 
are also identified for other types of documents. Again, we would love 
to hear your comments and suggestions. Please forward your comments to 
Standards [at] state.ma.us by September 9. I would also appreciate your 
assistance in spreading the word about this public review so we can get 
the broadest input possible. Thank you.' "

You can download a PDF of the official document here: 
http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/docs/policies_standards/etrm3dot5/ETRM_v3dot5draft_information.pdf

Let's hope Microsoft doesn't pull a white rabbit ... ;)

What seems interesting to me is that scribus currently is the only 
professional grade DTP app with OASIS support (correct me if I'm wrong). :)

Cheers,

Christoph