Massachusetts government officials on Thursday unveiled plans to phase out Microsoft Office in favor of office productivity suites that support an open-document format from the OASIS standards body, according to a statement from the commonwealth.
Massachusetts will support the newly ratified Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, as the standard for its office documents, according to the statement posted on the governmental Web site by Peter Quinn, chief information officer for Massachusetts. Developed within Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), OpenDocument is an XML (Extensible Markup Language)-based file format that covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.