[nzlug] Linux in NZ District Councils?

[Mark Foster]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007, Stephen Judd wrote:

> On 1/22/07, Richard Thomas <tich at clad.co.nz> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Yes it would assuming that the council isn't locked into using MS Office
>> for some reason.  Some places have software that uses Office to
>> automatically generate documents from databases and it's unlikely that the
>> software will support OpenOffice.
>
> One local govt body I had dealings with a few years ago used a
> document management system that depended on Office metadata to
> classify docs and on Office macros to integrate with Office. It would
> be a major exercise to factor out the dependencies on MS software. The
> response when I pointed out that Word documents were not the best way
> to store structured text was "but Microsoft is a standard". Really.

Microsoft is "A" standard. A defacto standard, an entirely poor standard 
for 'standards' sake, but still very common, especially in commercial and 
government type organisations.

> I imagine that many local bodies are in situations like that.

And the rest. Once you've adopted a standard, its very hard to change 
without also being backwards-compatible.

Which is why the lock-in tied to MS's implementation of the XML Document 
format particularly turned me off.  I can handle .doc documents created up 
to and including MS Office 2K3, because theyre still generally readable in 
OpenOffice. Beyond that, i'm not too sure...