UK government joins Office source-code scheme
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The UK government is at the forefront of a Microsoft scheme allowing access to the Office 2003 source code. Microsoft is to extend a programme offering governments access to its software code, it announced on Sunday.
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Microsoft planned to announce Monday that it would give dozens of governments and international agencies access to the programming code in its Office desktop software, including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail programs.
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In Berlin on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a product package aimed at local and regional e-government initiatives, in the midst of growing government opposition in Europe to proprietary software.Microsoft&#39;s Citizen Service Platform includes applications and templates designed for local and regional governments primarily in Europe and the United States. It is built on products, including SharePoint, Office Live, and Windows Server.While Microsoft has been selling software to the public sector for years, it has recently begun focusing on local governments after discovering that many people interact with their local governments more often than the federal government, said Ralph Young, vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Worldwide Public Sector group.Europe alone has more than 80,000 local and regional governments, Young said.Governments can use the Citizen Service Platform to create portals, manage documents, deploy alert systems in the case of emergencies, and create and manage citizen information databases that can be shared among different agencies.Microsoft is introducing the product as it faces&#160;mounting opposition Europe. Some governments there are migrating to open source products as a way to avoid being locked into a single vendor of proprietary software.Others, such as the Netherlands, are taking a more extreme route. Late last year, the Dutch parliament mandated that government organizations choose open source over proprietary software if a viable product is available. Agencies must also use open standards. The national government must comply with the new rules by May, with local governments following by the end of this year.Young was unfazed by the mandate. &quot;We have many opportunities in the Netherlands to work with local and regional governments,&quot; he said. &quot;We don&#39;t see any federal mandates having real impact locally because of local jurisdictions&#39; ability to make decisions in their best interest in terms of how to better serve citizens.&quot;Microsoft could be counting on local governments having autonomy from such federal mandates, said Mark Anderson, a consultant and founder of the Strategic News Service. &quot;There are a lot of times when a government will posture, and it doesn&#39;t really intend that posture to be carried through the rest of the country,&quot; he said.Still, some European government agencies may be predisposed to choose software other than Microsoft&#39;s, more so since the software giant began pushing its Open XML document format there, Anderson said. Microsoft is in the process of&#160;attempting to have Open XML be accepted as a standard&#160;by the International Organization for Standardization. Open XML competes with the Open Document Format promoted by IBM. Critics of Open XML accused Microsoft of stacking votes in the standardization process, souring some in Europe on Microsoft even further.Microsoft thinks that cost will determine decisions for many local governments. &quot;It&#39;s much less a religious discussion about open source and commercial software as it is about what are the solutions available that governments can see value from,&quot; said Young. &quot;Local governments are empowered to make decisions and if they say &#39;This is the best value for the dollar I spend over the life of a service capability, that will govern my decision-making process.&#39;&quot;
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Microsoft Corp. said on Sunday that it would share the underlying software code for its Office program as part of its efforts to make governments more confident in the security and compatibility
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Microsoft has begun a short-term validation programme aimed at tackling software piracy. Users are invited to have their copies of Windows XP analysed, with the promise that they will be replaced free of charge if found to be counterfeit.
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Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry will consider company's open-source desktop suite for future bids.
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Standardized open-source code for storage management is finally on its way, group announces.
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Microsoft-sponsored open-source group expected to release ODF translator for Word.
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UK government departments moved a step closer to using open-source operating systems such as Linux after a study found that they are "viable" products.
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IBM today joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software.
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Under contract with the Department of Homeland Security, Coverity seeks to establish a new security baseline for open-source applications.
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UK users will be able to replace pirated versions of Windows that they have purchased. Software pirates&#39; increasing skill at creating counterfeit versions of Windows XP has prompted Microsoft to introduce
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U.K. users will be able to replace pirated versions of Windows that they have purchased.
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A Microsoft UK replacement scheme for pirate copies of Windows XP suggests the company is testing the waters to see how feasible it is to convert sections of its unlicensed user base to legitimate users.
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Microsoft offered more than 60 governments the key to its Office desktop suite as the world's leading software maker faces growing competition from open-source rivals such as Linux.
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Microsoft Corp. said on Sunday that it  would share the underlying software code for its Office program  as part of its efforts to make governments more confident in  the security and compatibility of the world's largest software  maker's products.
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Microsoft Corporation said it would share the source code of its Microsoft Office desktop software with more than 60 governments, including China and Russia.