Exchange Formats for Office Documents: A Survey of Swiss Public Administrations

Olivier Glassey (1) , José Formaz (1)

1 IDHEAP - Institut de hautes études en administration publique

In April 2010 the IT department of the Canton of Vaud decided to migrate its whole office workstations' park (10'000 machines) from Microsoft Windows XP and Office XP to Windows Seven and Office 2010. In parallel they decided to establish recommendations in terms of exchange of office document and mandated us for a survey on the situation of office document formats in use at the Swiss Federal and Cantonal levels. In our paper we will present a brief panorama of the international situation (based on a literature review) and the results of the survey we conducted between January and March 2011. We sent out an online questionnaire through the Swiss Conference on Information Technology, an association grouping the IT departments of all Cantons and cities in Switzerland. The respondents were mostly IT managers from various public departments and offices, amongst which 156 completed the survey on behalf of their organization (88 from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and 68 from the German-speaking part). We found out that barely more than 25% of the public administrations we surveyed had recommendations in terms of office document formats, whereas almost 70% of the respondents do often or sometimes have compatibility problems when they exchange documents. When civil servants exchange documents that are read-only, they use the .pdf format and this usually does not raise any major issue. However when these documents have to be modified as well, it can quickly become quite complicated depending on office suites and versions being used, and on operating systems. Our phone interviews largely confirmed that a large number of issues were related to the use of advance functions such as merging, macros or VBA scripts, and that these functions are very widely used within administrative processes.

Domaines: Science politique

Olivier Glassey, José Formaz. Exchange Formats for Office Documents: A Survey of Swiss Public Administrations. European Conference on eGovernment (ECEG 2012), Jun 2012, Barcelona, Spain. pp.6. ⟨hal-00834059⟩