Continuing its commitment to support open technology movement in Indonesia, Sun Microsystems, familiarizes Open Document Format (ODF) to facilitate IT systems in Indonesian Governmental Institution and its various department. It is strongly believed that this will better leverage IT to deliver better government services to citizens and solve Indonesia's unique and diverse information technology challenges.
According to Harry Kaligis, General Manager Business Development, PT Sun Microsystems Indonesia, if more people can participate in the economy using information technology, then the economy can grow exponentially.
"Governments around the globe are looking to use IT to give their constituents a single point of access to available governmental services," said Kaligis.
He adds, open technology help foster a strong ecosystems of developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) that can be leveraged by government as it looks to scale the initiative and provide more service to the country. On the other hand, until recently, many government agencies opted not to gamble with any level of open access.
On the other hand, Giordie Klueber, GGS Technical Office Sun Microsystems said that currently 27 governments already use the ODF as a standard, include China, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, etc. He adds, any standard adoption should be chosen based spesifically on the benefits it enables.
"Sun recommends ODF as the preferred standard for office productivity application documents," said Klueber.
Currently, standards enable competition, which enable choice, lower cost, better quality, interoperability, and investment protection.
The Open Document Format (ODF) is an open XML-based document file format for office applications to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. The file format makes transformations to other formats simple by leveraging and reusing existing standards wherever possible.
While the specifications were originally developed by Sun Microsystems, the standard is under the stewardship of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), ODF also creates the possibility for new types of applications and solutions to be developed other than traditional office productivity applications.
ODF is defined via an open and transparent processs at OASIS and has been approved unanimously by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotiechnical Commission (IEC) as an international standard in May 2006. |
