News

UPDATED: U.K. Education Group Escalates Microsoft Complaints

A consultancy to the U.K. government has forwarded complaints about Microsoft's licensing and interoperability practices to the European Commission (EC), according to an announcement issued by the Becta consulting group yesterday.

Becta, or the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, helps the U.K. government with technology decision-making for thousands of U.K. schools and colleges. Its charges to the EC echo complaints about Microsoft's educational licensing agreements, as well as the interoperability of Microsoft's XML file formats, that the group first filed with the U.K.'s Office of Fair Trading back in October.

A press officer for the EC commented that the EC isn't treating Becta's complaint as a formal antitrust complaint, according to an IDG News Service story. However, the EC has been engaged since January in investigating interoperability issues surrounding Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document formats, which are used in the Microsoft Office 2007 software suite.

OOXML was ratified as an international standard by the ISO/IEC organizations in April. Currently, two international standards for document formats exist: OOXML (ISO/IEC 29500) and Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300). ODF is backed by Microsoft's competing vendors, including Sun Microsystems and IBM, both of which offer free office productivity suite solutions, similar in functionality to Microsoft Office.

Becta issued a statement when OOXML was approved that teachers and parents "would best be served by a single standard which accommodated the existing Open Document Format specification." However, ISO's FAQ on the matter seems to disagree with that position, stating that "After a period of co-existence, it is basically the market that decides which [standard] survives."

Currently, Becta is recommending to the U.K. educational community that it not deploy Microsoft Office 2007. Also, it recommends that users should save files in the older .doc, .xls and .ppt formats until OOXML is compatible with ODF.

Becta typically doesn't file competition complaints, according to Dr. Steven Lucey, Becta's executive director of strategic technologies.

"Intervention via the competition authorities is not our preferred approach," Lucey said in a prepared statement. "Ideally we prefer to address interoperability issues by working in close partnership with the wider industry."

A Microsoft spokesperson stated by e-mail that "Microsoft is deeply committed to education and interoperability." The statement countered some of Becta's claims.

"We have funded the development of tools to promote interoperability between Office 2007 and products based on the ODF file format. We will continue to work with Becta and the Commission in a cooperative manner to resolve these issues."

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.