The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents have been announced by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.

The standards set out the document file formats that are expected to be used across all government bodies. Government will begin using open formats that will ensure that citizens and people working in government can use the applications that best meet their needs when they are viewing or working on documents together.

When departments have adopted these open standards:

The new National Digital Interoperability Regulation, which defines the list of open standards to be adopted in the Portuguese public administration, names ODF as the sole open standard for editable documents. This announcement is part of a larger ICT reform program that aims to save 500M EUR/year while providing stimulus to the local economy. Other standards for formats and protocols include PDF, XML, XMPP, IMAP, SMTP, CALDAV and LDAP.

"Earlier this year the OpenOffice.org code base was donated to The Apache Software Foundation. The resulting project, Apache OpenOffice (Incubating) is progressing well as a podling in the Apache Incubator with a rapidly growing community and project infrastructure (seehttp://incubator.apache.org/projects/openofficeorg.html).

The new version of ODF delivers many enhancements called for by the international community including support for digital signatures, semantic web technology, and the OpenFormula spreadsheet language.