Group:OpenDocument/Who

North America

• United States

  • Massachusetts: The Commonwealth had in September 2005, become the first state to formally endorse OpenDocument formats for its public records and, at the same time, reject Microsoft's proprietary XML format. This decision was made after a two-year examination of file formats, including many discussions with Microsoft, other vendors, and various experts. After this announcement by Massachusetts supporting OpenDocument, a large number of people and organizations spoke up about the policy, including Microsoft who sent in a letter highly critical of the measure, as well as a group named "Citizens Against Government Waste", who had received funding from Microsoft. While still permitting use of ODF, in 2007 Massachusetts unfortunately also amended its approved technical standards list to include Office Open XML.

  • New York: The state has <a href="http://www.oft.state.ny.us/oftnews/erecords-study.htm">sought comments</a> on its proposed policy which seeks to gather stakeholder input regarding the mechanisms and processes for obtaining access to and reading electronic data so that such data can be created, maintained, exchanged, and preserved by the state in a manner that encourages appropriate government control, access, choice, interoperability, and vendor neutrality.

South America

• Argentina: In September 2007 the Argentinian Province of Misiones decided that the use of ODF will be mandatory within the government. Around a million people live in this province, which is one of the 23 provinces of Argentina.
• Brazil: As the General Director of ODF Alliance Chapter Brazil declared at the debate hosted at CONSEGI 2008: "the citizen must understand that when they open a government website and the file offered is in a format of a proprietary software, it presupposes that he/she is obligated to have the license of that software, what is unacceptable and out of the law." (<a href="http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/09/28/brazil-begins-using-the-open-document-format/">Source</a>)

Europe

• European Commission: In 2014, a statement from the Vice-President of the European Commission Maroš Šefčovič recommended, “For revisable documents, all European institutions are recommended to support as a minimum two ISO standards, the Open Document Format (ODT) and Office Open XML (OOXML).”

• Belgium: In 2006, it was declared that all government departments must be able to read ODF and from September this year, all exchanges of documents between federal goverment agencies must use OpenDocument.

• Croatia:In April 2008, the <a href="http://www.hzn.hr/english/priopcenja.html">Croatian Standards Institute</a> (Hrvatski zavod za norme, HZN) confirmed it had <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7563/469">approved</a> the Open Document Format ODF as a national standard.

• Germany: In 2008, the German federal government declared its <a href="http://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2008/12/odf.html">readiness to support ODF</a>.

• Finland: The Ministry of Justice has chosen Open Office and thus the OpenDocument format as their main document format from the beginning of 2007. The decision was made after deep research of ODF possibilities. Other ministries may follow.

• Germany: The Federal Foreign Office has migrated totally to OpenDocument, with 250 foreign offices outside of Germany also following. The cities of Freiburg and Munich have both adopted OpenOffice.org and many of the high courts in Germany, including the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice), are accepting OpenDocument communications.

• Netherlands: From the beginning of 2009, the OpenDocument format and free software will be the standard for reading, publishing and the exchange of information for all governmental organizations. Where free software cannot be not used, special reasons must be given.

• Norway: Norway's Ministry of Government Administration and Reform decided in December 2007 that ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) must be used from 2009 when publishing documents that are meant to be changed after downloading, i.e. forms that are to be filled in by the user.

• United Kingdom: The British Education Communication Technology Agency, BECTA, made a recommendation that "Any office application used by institutions must be able to be saved to (and so viewed by others) using a commonly agreed format that ensures an institution is not locked into using specific software." In addition, Bristol City Council is using the OpenDocument format across its 5000+ desktop computers.

• Slovakia: OpenDocument is listed alongside HTML, XML and PDF as an acceptable format by the Ministry of Transport, Posts and Telecommunications.

• Denmark: In April 2011, the Danish parliament began using ODF as the official format for its documents.

• France: The French government's general interoperability framework indicates that ODF is the recommended format for office documents within French administrations.

• Italy: The Italian standardization organization UNI adopted ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF 1.0) on January 26, 2007 (UNI CEI ISO/IEC 26300:2007). In 2015, the Italian Ministry of Defence announced that it would standardise on ODF and install LibreOffice on 150,000 PCs.

Africa

• South Africa: On October 23, 2007, the Department of Public Service and Administration of the South African government released a report on interoperability standards in government information systems. It specifies ODF as the standard for "working office document formats" (with UTF-8/ASCII text and comma-separated values data as the only alternatives). In 2008, ODF was adopted as a national standard.

Asia-Pacific

• India: In 2006, the Allahabad High Court of India decided, as policy, to use OpenDocument format for its documents. The states of Kerala and Assam have also adopted ODF.

• Japan: On June 29, 2007, the government of Japan published a new interoperability framework which gives preference to the procurement of products that follow open standards including the ODF standards.

• Malaysia: In August 2007, the Malaysian government announced plans to adopt open standards and the Open Document Format within the country's public sector. The Malaysian Administration Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) issued a tender for a nine-month study to evaluate the usage of open standards. ODF adoption became mandatory in April 2008.

• Vietnam: In 2009, Vietnam made ODF <a href="http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/vietnam-odf.pdf">a national standard</a>.

• Hong Kong: In 2008, the government of Hong Kong's annual Interoperability Framework recommended Open Document Format.

• South Korea: The South Korean government adopted OpenDocument as a part of Korean Industrial Standards KS X ISO/IEC 26300 in 2007.

• Australia: In 2013, the Australian government adopted a policy requiring that any office suite used by the government should, at a minimum, support Open Document Format 1.1.