Portugal publishes open standards catalog. ODF, PDF and several other standards are mandatory.

The Portuguese Government has published the National Digital Interoperability Regulation [2], which defines the list of open standards to be adopted in the Portuguese public administration. This framework brings to life the existing Law of Open Standards [1]. It is part of the larger ICT reform program that aims to save 500M EUR/year while providing stimulus to the local economy.

We must stress the importance of the whole open standards adoption process and declare our explicit support for the way the interoperability regulation was designed. On one hand, there is some pragmatism to be noticed: the list of open standards is relatively short with priority given to functions where interoperability problems are a large concern. On the other hand, pragmatism didn’t mean lost of insight: there is no more than one open standard per functional category. This is something ESOP has always defended, as a measure to prevent incompatibilities that could bring the adoption process to a failure.

Choices have been made and ODF is the chosen open standard for editable documents. We think this is appropriate since ODF is implemented by several different vendors, in both open source and proprietary applications, across multiple operating systems. As a truly open standard, it can be implemented by any vendor that wishes to do so. This is a choice that will save money and avoid vendor lock in.

Other standards for formats and protocols include PDF, XML, XMPP, IMAP, SMTP, CALDAV and LDAP.

ESOP

Portugal Government actually has a sane decision.

Untill now every time i installed Libre/Open-Office on someone’s computer i set it up using .dox and .xls as standard save file formats. Not anymore. It’s about time the world get used to using open standards, and it’s about time most people install some free version of standards compliant officesuite on their computers if their MS Office is not ODF compliant. (( To be fair i think ODF has been supported in MS Office since Office 2007 but i’m not sure to which degree and not sure if it’s not an optional download from MS website. ))