Back to the Future: Another chance to influence COE development
- 21
- Jan
As Kayelle noted earlier in the week, AGIMO’s Common Operating Environment (COE) policy is now finalised and available on the web. Since it was released, there has been a range of discussions about aspects of the policy in posts and comments on several online news sites (e.g. here, here, here and here). Much has also been said on Twitter – mainly at #AGIMO. Support has varied – there have been positive views and negative comments. Several people suggested we hadn’t been open about this – despite blog posts (here and here) and various presentations. As Andrea DiMaio from Gartner has pointed out, we really tried hard to get public comment. Since people seem to have more to say, we have reopened the discussion in the hope that constructive criticism will inform future versions of the policy.
Before reading new comments, please take a moment to view the background on the document standard issue.
What standard does AGIMO support?
The intent of the policy is to mandate a file format that fully supports the primary office productivity suites used within government agencies. Based on a survey conducted in 2010, a large number of agencies (representing the majority of the desktop fleet) have signalled their intention to move to either Office 2007 or 2010 as part of their next upgrade.
To support the capability of these office productivity suites, the Office Open XML format, based on the ECMA-376 1st edition, was chosen to provide the greatest level of compatibility. The Office 2007 format is based on the ECMA-376 1st edition and the Office 2010 default format is based on the ISO/IEC 29500 “transitional” standard. The ISO/IEC 29500 “transitional” standard is very close (in practical terms) to ECMA-376 first edition. Because of the similarity between the standards, files created in Office 2010 can be used without significant issues in Office 2007.
Other formats were considered, but after careful consideration and discussion with the agencies it was agreed that many existing documents would not be properly converted by these other formats.
Importantly the policy does not exclude other formats from being used but seeks to ensure that at a minimum one common format can be accessed on all Australian Government computers.
The following table shows a range of office suites and their compatibility with the various standards:
| Product | Available Standards | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 | ECMA-376 1st Edition | Read/Write |
| ODF | Read/Write | |
| Microsoft Office 2010 | ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional | Read/Write |
| ISO/IEC 29500 Strict | Read | |
| ODF | Read/Write | |
| Microsoft Wordpad 6.1 | ISO/IEC 29500 | Read/Write |
| ODF | Read/Write | |
| SoftMaker Office 2010 | ECMA-376 1st Edition | Read/Write |
| ODF | Read/Write | |
| OpenOffice 3.2 and above | ECMA-376 1st Edition | Read |
| ODF | Read/Write | |
| iWork | ECMA-376 1st Edition | Import |
| ECMA-376 1st Edition | Import | |
| TextEdit | ODF | Read/Write |
| IBM Lotus Notes | ECMA-376 1st Edition | Import |
| ODF | Read/Write | |
| WordPerfect | ODF | Read/Write |
| Kingsoft Office | ECMA-376 1st Edition | Import |
| ODF | Read/Write | |
| Google Docs | ECMA-376 1st Edition | Import |
| ODF | Read/Write |
Note: ODF refers to the ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Standard.
What’s the difference between the minimum standard of interoperability we are seeking to achieve between agencies and the public-facing publication of documents by agencies?
The use of common standards promotes interoperability, provides common functionality and supports a consistent user experience. These standards applied to all users regardless of how the desktop environment is delivered. By using the agreed common standards, agencies can share services and reduce the need for duplication. Agencies will be in a position to implement an application or service, which can then be reused by other government agencies. The COE will enable agencies to respond more quickly to changing technology cycles as it facilitates more cost-effective upgrades and supports a move to more rapid adoption cycles, enhancing agency and government agility.
The COE policy represents the set of minimum requirements that agencies are required to use. Agencies are able to make changes to meet their business requirements. Agency modifications must not decrease or weaken the level of IT security endorsed by the policy.
The COE policy only affects the manner in which documents are exchanged between agencies. The requirements for accessibility mean that documents available to the public through government websites, for example, are published in alternative formats to ensure the needs of citizens are met.
What did the SOE survey discover?
In April and May 2010, AGIMO conducted a survey of Government Agencies to collect information about their current desktop ICT environments. The survey identified more than 265,000 PC operating environments across Australian Government agencies. Of these, more than 99.5% are Windows based operating systems. MACOS, Solaris and Linux were also represented but each had less than 0.5% combined representation. With regard to office suites, MS Office is used on more than 86% of the PCs. IBM Lotus Symphony is used on just under 13%, with Corel WordPerfect, Apple Office 2004/2008 and Open Office each being used on less than 1% of the PCs. In the survey, agencies were also asked to identify the major components to which they were planning to upgrade. Windows 7, Office 2007 and Office 2010 were identified as major components. No other Office Productivity Suites were identified. The results of this survey highlighted that the majority of agencies are already using or planning to upgrade to the standards identified in the COE Policy.
Which agencies were involved in the consultation for the development of this policy? What other consultations took place?
There has been extensive consultation. CIOs, users and technicians were all asked for and provided feedback. In October 2009, as part of its decision on Whole-of-Government desktop coordinated procurement, the Government agreed to a recommendation of the Desktop Scoping Study, which identified the development of a Common Operating Environment as a critical element in driving future savings in services provisioning and in increasing the flexibility and responsiveness of government operations.
The draft Policy has been available for agency review since June 2010. As changes have been agreed, the document has been updated and agencies notified of the changes.
In mid-April 2010, more than 100 agency Chief Information Officers were contacted, provided with the background of the Project and asked to provide members for the Working Group and the COE collaboration site. All the Government Portfolios (representing all the FMA Act agencies) provided representation. Working Group meetings were held in June, July, September, October and November 2010. The Government’s Chief Information Officer Committee (CIOC) endorsed the draft COE policy in early December, with the Secretaries’ ICT Governance Board (SIGB) endorsing it on 21 December.
As discussed above, the draft policy was published here on the AGIMO Blog as a discussion paper.
The development of the Policy was also informed by a pilot activity which ran from July to October 2010. The pilot was based on a Windows 7 upgrade.
Where to from here?
The COE policy is subject to annual reviews. The first of these will commence in mid-2011. Public comments on this post will be used to inform the review. We have taken the liberty of moving one comment already received about this issue on an unrelated post to this new post to kick the discussion off.
Please note that while we will maintain our liberal post-moderation policy, a Microsoft vs OpenOffice mud-slinging competition will do little to progress the policy.
Regards
John
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The objectives behind this initiative are valid, however it seems to have been missed that although it is valid to have everyone on the same core SOE/COE, this is not possible when they are all using different end devices from different Vendors (Desktops, Laptops, Thin Clients, etc.). The biggest issues Agencies/Depts have had in the past managing their own SOE, is that each PC Vendor uses different graphics/chipsets/etc., and the SOE has to be ‘adjusted’ to suit each Vendor’s PC/LT (and each model change). Unlike Monitors etc that have nil impact upoin the SOE, different PCs require a different SOE – and building a new SOE when you have 400+ applications like ATO, is not an easy task. Add to this the fact that AGIMO is deciding on a quarter by quarter basis which PC the Agencies/Depts must procure for that quarter, and I can see this whole ...
... thing being a disaster in 12 months. Thin Client devices will assist this problem greatly, dependent upon which variation of Desktop Virtualisation is implemented, but even they have their issues between Vendors. May I suggest that in order to avert this pending disaster (if I am correct) that AGIMO allow Agencies/Depts to procure the same End User device across their entire platform, until their platform is refreshed (some take 6 mths and some take 3 years). That is – they are allowed to buy the same AGIMO approved
device at equal to each quarter’s procepoint until their entire fleet is refreshed (but not a different device each quarter). Enforcement of a common SOE is only valid and achievable if all the End User devices are the same drivers/chipsets/mem configs/TPM, etc etc. (eg. Which Bank ABC has an entire fleet of Vendor XYZ PCs/TCs).
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That’s only a problem on the Microsoft platform
On Linux, you can take the hard drive from one machine and whack it in another with a completely different chipset, network card, video card, and it’ll just work.
-c
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Thanks for your input. The COE Policy does not require a single SOE across government or even across an agency. It is designed to reduce the number of SOEs and thus simplify IT administration across government, making support easier both within government and by industry.
We are conscious of the issue raised here regarding machine-specific SOEs although, increasingly and welcomely, it seems less of a problem than it once was. To address this issue, the desktop hardware panel arrangements provide for both follow-on purchases (of the same equipment) and just-in-time delivery of equipment following an initial purchase. Both these arrangements extend over the quarterly review of best prices.
Ideally, agencies should be moving to standardised environments that aren’t so dependent on chipsets and specific devices. The COE Policy is designed to assist in that regard.
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Hi John,
You response seems to have missed Chris’s point about Operating Systems. Linux and MS Operating System work on the same machines.
In the past there have been cases in which some hardware is not supported but this is becoming rarer.
It is worth noting that the eeepc is commercially available outside Australia running Linux out of the box, whereas only the MS version is available in Australia. I can’t say whether Government Policy is the cause or the effect.
Looking at the Application level,
Open Office works on MS and Linux.
MSOffice is not available on Linux.
With regard to interoperability and accessibility the ideal is to have information available across platforms (from I-Phones to Netbooks and Desktops) via standardised encoding in HTML.
Here Wikis play a crucial part – however with an unwarranted focus on printing, a major obstacle appears to be the layout (for printing) controls. Ofcourse, we have all compromised on the ...
... quality of the printed documents in the transition to “Desktop Publishing”.
Of interest might be my notes from the session on When will Wikis supersede traditional WP from last Friday’s Recent Changes Camp.
http://ramin.com.au/itgovernance/when-will-wikis-supersede-traditional-word-processing.shtml
On a slight tangent, is there a repository/index of Australian Data Sets that have been released into the public domain?
Marghanita
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How does the adoption of OOXML support this (extracted from AGIMO Circular 2010/11 Open Source Software Policy) :
Principle 3: Australian Government agencies will actively participate in open source software communities and contribute back where appropriate. The Australian Government, through AGIMO, will actively seek to keep up-to-date with international best practice in the open source software arena, through engaging
with other countries and organisations. Australian Government agencies should also actively participate in open source software communities and contribute back where appropriate
Could I suggest the first community you become involved in the Open Office community, probably save over $50mill a year.
I’m done, this is terrible.
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160 comments gone? Is this incompetence or censorship?
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I’m sorry – I don’t understand this. This is comment 165. Only one has been moderated out.
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John,
What David is taking about I’m seeing as well.
The auto-generated count says there have been 165 comments, but only 5 display. Somehow those other 160 comments have become invisible.
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Thanks Steve, I understand now. We may have broken something. I don’t think we have had thi many comments before. I’ll check it out.
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A little more detail…
The URL at the top of the page contains
“back-to-the-future-…/comment-page-2/”
It’s not obvious how to get to …/comment-page-1/
[I checked, they're still there]
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Thanks again. It’s a word press comment page setting. But apparently one my staff don’t trust me to have access to! I’ll see what we can do in the morning to fix this.
Cheers
John
(who clearly isn’t as much in charge as he thought)
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David
This is the url to the last comment on the first page
#comment-2203
and for completeness, the first #comment-1987
This will allow you (and others) to scan backwards until John and his crew fix this small glitch.
@John. Congrats on handling this deluge with style and aplomb. Well done.
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Sorry about this – it was part of the site’s theme and the way it dealt with older comments – and comment paging – the comments were still there but the navigation links weren’t appearing. Maybe we didn’t expect so many comments! Actually we did but didn’t know the theme behaved this way.
And John don’t hold your breath for admin access.
We fixed it this morning and all should be good now.
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I thought it’d be interesting to try to measure just how much the Federal government distorts the IT market, so here’s a quick survey of jobs listed on seek.com.au at the moment in two categories: all jobs and jobs with the keyword “microsoft”. Broken down by city:
Sydney: 41338 3320 8.0%
Melbourne: 33260 2311 6.9%
Brisbane: 16767 1155 6.9%
Perth : 15413 1066 6.9%
ACT: 4114 398 9.7%
The ACT has a significantly higher proportion of job ads featuring the keyword “microsoft”, presumably due to Federal government policies. It’d be interesting to do a deeper study…
David
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Hi John,
With regards to the AGIMO PC Hardware Supply Panel, I understand that the process for selecting the ‘winner’ in each category has not yet been completed for Q1 Calendar Year 2011. When the process is complete, would it be possible for AGIMO to publish that list. Just as last time around, there is much rumour and speculation going on leading up to AGIMO’s decision, and even afterwards (judging by last time) it is still not certain who has won what in each category, as the decision is not made public.
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Hi IT VENDOR
Not sure where this is at right now but I’ll check it out and whether we can or how we could publish it.
Cheers
John
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Thanks John – much appreciated.
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It is good you are just starting to look at the issue of document file formats and using the web to get feedback. The EU’s Valoris report of 2003 was when I first became aware of the issues.
It might have been worth evaluating the purpose of a document file format rather than just asking people what they are using. Your national archive has some experience.
One objective is that the format can be used by multiple suppliers in multiple products so there is no need to convert documents. Like web browsers and html pages. This means no one company has an advantage.
The design of ECMA-376 1st Edition makes this impossible. This white paper explains why?
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/odf_ooxml_technical_white_paper
A second objective is the format should be universal so it can be used to store any document in any real or imaginary language used in the past, present or future . Thirdly, it ...
... must be able to transform over decades. This means all elements must by in plain text rather than “binary blobs”.
Fourthly, it should reuse as many existing open standards so developers don’t have to learn a new format for doing things they are already doing. (ie. codes for colours, languages, country, representation of dates and percentages…) Fifthly….sixthly…
Your choice fails all four of these objectives so logically it cannot be intended for long term strategic use. However, it will make it easier to transition to more open formats which in 2-15 years time will make your IT systems more cost effective. (See French Police “This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent”[1]. See Bristol City Council saving more that 20% of their budget for office suites)
One simple example of objective one. All products needs to save different settings into the file. The format you have picked essentially requires the standard to be changed for each supplier except for the company who wrote the standard. In contrast, other document file formats (ie. odf) do not.
One of the comments I read was about the need to protect documents. It is quite difficult to create effective encryption systems and most have weaknesses. I believe the format you have picked uses a method that has not been subject to peer-review. In contrast other file formats just reuse existing standards that security agencies and others have evaluated as strong.
Also, the methods used for authentication and authorization need to be designed to be vendor neutral. Again, this requires looking at the underlying format. Given the monopoly position of your current supplier it seems likely you will be implementing systems which makes you dependent upon them. (ie. Active Directory is currently vendor dependent while something like ldap+shibboleth/saml is vendor neutral.)
[1] http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-gendarmerie-saves-millions-with-open-desktop-and-web-applications
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Another reason why open standards are important and publishing of HTML is compelling.
“The Australian Government through the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) has announced funding of $1 million for the purchase of playback devices for public libraries around the country…..:
http://www.alia.org.au/Library_Initiative/
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One obvious reference that was missed http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/OOXML_GovsNeedKnow_Oct2010
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Hello, would it be at all possible to get detailed information on why the Australian Government has selected MAPI as a protocol for an EMAIL Client ?
How does selecting MAPI help the Australian Federal Public Service reach the Goals and Principles outlined in the COE?
Many thanks,
Ken
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Well, you see, its a purchasing decision, not a technology or public good issue.
You seem to think that one document must be consistent with another?
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A couple of quick questions:
- Can you give us an idea of who is using IBM Lotus Symphony ?
- SmartSuite is not on the list – Centrelink are still using it (along with the shinny new Office 2007), that’s about 26,000 seats
Cheers,
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Hi Ken
Our figures show about 13% of users use IBM Lotus Symphony. A quick check suggests to me that this term has been used generically to cover Smartsuite as well. At the time of the survey, most, if not all, of those would have been in Centrelink.
Cheers,
John
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Thanks for the information.
So the actual number is 99% of Government Agencies use Office.
Centrelink recently purchased Office and deployed it on all their PC’s. Interestingly they did that (and spent X millions of dollars) without going to the market or conducting any review of the alternatives listed above. Further more they did it at the same time they deployed Lotus Notes 8 which included Symphony.
Somehow the FMA does not apply to purchasing Microsoft Products.
The reality is that the Government has chosen to standardise on the MS Office format because it had already decided to standardise on Microsoft Office. Very simple.
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Perhaps a policy that encourages authoring in XHTML/HTML would make this issue redundant? It would also simplify interoperability across all platforms. Our attention could then (rightly) shift to simplifying document transportability.
I’m not excited by the vast array of layout and style capabilities that modern authoring tools exhibit (which I understand is what the Open XML standard is really attempting to standardize) since they tend to distract authors from the quality of their writing. Separating layout instructions from content would allow content to be presented in many formats on many devices; that’s really what XML/HTML excel at.
Now that would be a courageous and forward-thinking policy – in my opinion.
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[...] in 2010 by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) discovered that 86% of 265000 federal government PCs are currently running Microsoft Office. The majority of the government agencies that responded to [...]
[...] we published the first version of the Whole-of-Government Common Operating Environment (COE) Policy on this blog. Unexpectedly, it resulted in the largest number of comments we have ever received on a single [...]