It is an unfortunate decision on the part of the IDA to award the SOE to a set of technologies that are essentially all Microsoft. We are going to waste S$1.3 billion of tax payers monies on proprietary, lock in. With a broken OOXML, what’s the hard guarantee that this SOE project will be open standards compliant? Will someone from IDA reply? In public?
In most case, people weight technologies more than standards. That’s the main problem. If people weight standards more than technologies, ms office will not be used, since it has poor support for odf. If ooxml pass, okay, if fail, it could definitely attract some attention.
I’m not sure whether open standards compliant for government is compulsory or not.However, open standards should be recommended more than close standards.
If editable data is shared to and fro, open standards will be more preferred. You can download odf and open it, or send odf to others to open it. (if .doc can be sent, why not open standards like .odt).
If ms would build in odf support by default in their office suite, maybe roll out as an update, it’ll be better. I don’t think everyone will download manually from third party and install it manually in ms office.
If there are recommendation like paper released from BECTA quite recently that advise UK schools on open standards or so, it’ll be great.