Lebech said Denmark considers OOXML an open standard, regardless whether it is approved by the ISO. "It would be impossible for us to use only ISO standards if we want to fulfill the goal of creating interoperability in the government sector," he said.
The Danish Parliament also mandated that public agencies consider the cost of using open formats. One of the main reasons OOXML was included is because Denmark is heavily dependent on document management systems that are integrated with Microsoft's Office products, Lebech said.
Denmark also found that requiring agencies to only use ODF would have been too expensive, mostly because of the cost of converting documents into ODF, Lebech said.
"We wouldn't have been able to only support ODF," Lebech said. "It wouldn't have been cost neutral."
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