Malaysian Government Adopts the Open Document Format

The Malaysian Administration Modernization and Management Planning Unit inside the Malaysian Government has recently expressed its interest in adopting the Open Document Format. It seems that the Malaysian Government is also interested in migrating to the open source standards, at least regarding the public sector.

The Administration Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) said they will first make a study and evaluate the open standards inside their information communications technology deployment sector. The study targets to reveal the benefits of using open standards but it is also said to offer the grounds for completing a scheme for the ODF implementing in Malaysia.

Nor Aliah Mohd. Zahri, information communications technology deputy director general at MAMPU, said in an official statement regarding the decision to adopt the ODF standard: "The decision taken has been deliberated carefully for a considerable amount of time, and much thought process has been put into it ...These discussions centered on open formats, particularly as they relate to office documents, their importance for the current and future accessibility of government records, and the relative 'openness' of the format options available to us," Nor Aliah explained.

However, this intention in making the national format standards aligned to the ODF is actually older. One of the technical committee members of the country's standards development agency (called SIRIM) said this was proposed even from last year's July, but it needed further approvals.

The OpenDocument format (by its full name OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) is a file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations, databases and word processing documents. The standard was developed by a technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium and based upon the XML format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite.

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