The State of Massachusetts has unveiled a plan to replace Microsoft Office with a software suite that supports the open standards set by the Oasis standards body.

Massachusetts' chief information officer Peter Quinn said in a document posted on the State's website (PDF download available here) that the State seeks in particular to embrace Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument. 

"Given that the majority of Executive Department agencies currently use office applications that produce documents in proprietary formats, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes and WordPerfect, the magnitude of the migration effort to this new open standard is considerable," Quinn wrote.

"Agencies will need to develop phased migration plans with a target implementation date of 1 January 2007."

Any government agency that plans to purchase new office applications before that date now has to pick an application that supports the OpenDocument standard.

The plan has yet to be approved. A draft has been published to allow the public to comment.

Brian Jones, a programme manager for Microsoft Office, pointed out on his blog that the forthcoming version of Office 12 will save documents in an open XML supported format by default that allows users of competing suites to open the documents.

A first beta of the software is due out later this year, followed by the final product unveiling in 2006.

Jones referred to the Massachusetts proposal to standardise on the OpenDocument standard as "short sighted and unnecessarily exclusive".

"There has been no thorough research into the open XML formats for Office 12, " he wrote.

The Microsoft document format, however, appears to be incompatible with the General Public Licence suggesting that open source applications including OpenOffice will not be able to use it.

By sticking to its XML format, Microsoft claims that it can guarantee compatibility across different versions of Office that would not be possible using the OpenDocument standard.