ODF news - ODF is now an ISO spec,and Mass has issued an RFI for an MS-Office ODF plug-in/converter

[Peter Korn <Peter.Korn@Sun.COM>]

Greetings,

It's been a busy day for ODF today.

First, the ISO vote finished, and was overwhelmingly positive.  ODF now 
has the formal name: "ISO/IEC 26300 
<http://iso.nocrew.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43485&scopelist=PROGRAMME>". 
There is also an ODF Alliance press release 
<http://www.odfalliance.org/press/AllianceRelease3May06.pdf> talking 
about this.

Second, Massachusetts' Information Technology Division has just issued a 
Request for Information 
<https://www.ebidsourcing.com/processPublicSolSummView.do?action=soltypeCd&docStatus=OPEN&docUserId=3070&docViewType=OPEN&docId=106466&doValidateToken=false&soltypeCd=ITP> 
(RFI) regarding Open Document Format Plug-ins for the Microsoft Office 
Suite.  Such a plug-in would allow AT users to stay in MS-Office but 
nonetheless read/write ODF files.  I know of at least two different 
approaches to this problem, and I expect Massachusetts will be 
investigating and testing both of them in the coming months, at around 
the same time as they evaluate the quality of AT support to native ODF 
apps like StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and IBM Workplace.

I've mentioned both of these things on my blog today (see 
http://blogs.sun.com/korn).  I also included an update on our good work.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.