Microsoft's XML-based Office file formats is NOT on Massachusetts' list of approved file formats. Apparently, this would forbid use of Microsoft Office by State of Massachusetts employees in future -unless, of course, the almighty Microsoft complies with ODF specifications and licensing requirements. This decision offers MA government agencies many choices -including an option to retain their existing MS Office licenses (provided they use a method to save documents in Open Document Format), or make use of one of the many office tools that support Open Document Format in native format -such as but not limited to OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, Abiword, eZ publish, IBM Workplace, Knomos case management, Scribus DTP, TextMaker and Visioo Writer.

Microsoft MS XML schema was excluded from the list of approved ODF file formats primarily due to the fact that even though it is licensed under a *somewhat* open patent license, its license is not as open as Adobe’s copyright license for PDF. It was further stated that Adobe’s copyright license for the data structures, operators and written specification constituting the interchange format called the Portable Document Format or "PDF" imposes minimal legal restrictions on developers.

For a complete FAQ on this important decision, State of Massachusetts has published a FAQ document on their web portal. You may be able to get to that document in one of the following two ways. This is a Direct link to ODF FAQ at MA. If the above link does not work, try going to Massachusetts Government Web Portal and searching for policies_standards_opendocformfaqs