OfficeShots bèta

[Press Release, Orvieto, Italy/The Hague, The Netherlands, November 3 2009]
The Dutch government program Netherlands in Open Connection and OpenDoc Society have announced the public availability of a beta version of Officeshots.org. Officeshots is an online webservice that makes it possible to compare the output quality of various office suites as well as web-based productivity applications. The project is financially supported by a grant from the Netherlands based not-for-profit investor NLnet Foundation.

The announcement took place during the second ODF plugfest, which brought together vendors and open source projects like IBM, Google, KOffice, Microsoft, Novell and OpenOffice.org. "In a mature market a user should be able to compare the various suppliers transparently." says Bert Bakker, president of the OpenDoc Society. "Officeshots.org ensures that you can see who delivers the best support for document exchange standards"

The service is available in a number of languages, including English, French, German, Chinese and Dutch. Users can submit a document, and can see what the output is of the various applications on the market. Officeshots gives both end users and developers a powerful tool to make quality differences measurable. Vendors are encouraged to add new office products themselves to the service, to allow customers to check as many products on the market prior to purchase.

"We want to make interoperability quantifiable" said Ineke Schop, program manager at Netherlands in Open Connection. "Any differences between the various applications are now visible and measurable, which helps support the ambitions of the Dutch cabinet to standardise on ODF and PDF for document exchange."

Under the "Netherlands in Open Connection" action plan, the Dutch administration accepts and uses the Open Document Format as of April last year. Other government bodies in the Netherlands do so since January 2009. The program is a joint initiative of the Dutch government, led by the minister for Foreign Trade Heemskerk and the State Secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations Bijleveld-Schouten.