This ODF Alliance white paper describes how documents are the life blood of modern governments and their citizens. Governments use documents to capture knowledge, store critical information, coordinate activities, measure results, and communicate across departments and with businesses and citizens. Increasingly documents are moving from paper to electronic form. To adapt to ever-changing technology and business processes, governments need assurance that they can access, retrieve and use critical records, now and in the future.

OpenDocument Format (ODF) addresses these issues by standardizing file formats to give governments true control over their documents. Governments using applications that support ODF gain increased efficiencies, more flexibility and greater technology choice, leading to enhanced capability to communicate with and serve the public.