Corporate report

Implementing open standards for documents

Published 25 February 2015

1. Introduction

Government Digital Service (GDS) announced to government technology leaders in July 2014 plans to implement open document standards across departments. It established Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF 1.2) as the standard for sharing documents across the public sector. Portable Document Format (PDF/A) and Hyper Text Markup Language - Fifth Revision (HTML5) are the default formats for publishing documents.

This document describes how and when HMRC will implement open formats for publishing documents and for creating, editing and saving documents in its office productivity tools. This will give HMRC’s customers (both internal and external) a high degree of flexibility and choice of document formats.

2. Phase 1 – publishing in open format

2.1 What we have already done

By 30 November 2014 HMRC had ensured that:

• all new documents for publication on GOV.UK complied with, or were converted to, open standards
• all new PDF publications on GOV.UK were in PDF/A format
• historic documents were made available in open formats by request

2.2 Current

HMRC’s ambition is to be digital first with all of its new developments. Our digital teams are able to generate and publish documents in ODF version 1.2 and PDF/A formats. We will also continue to increase the use of our online services, both internal and external, which will reduce the requirement for these file types.

Our transition to GOV.UK for our corporate information and customer guidance addressed the challenge of all viewable content published in HTML format meeting the HTML5 standard.

2.3 Upcoming

By 31 March 2015:

• best practice as prescribed by Government Digital Service (and open standard communities) will have been embedded into our publishing processes
• HMRC will update guidelines and governance processes for content owners in the department to meet the need to produce GOV.UK content that is compliant with the new standards
• HMRC will inform its third party suppliers that any publications produced on our behalf must be PDF/A or ODF 1.2 compliant

2.4 Exceptions

Documents for machine readable purposes (financial data exchange) will remain unchanged.

3. Phase 2 - Office Productivity Tools and ODF

3.1 Current

HMRC is currently rolling out Microsoft Office 2013 as part of the move to Windows 7 and has completed 96.5% of the upgrades. Office 2013 can save and open documents in ODF.

This will give us the capability to save all new documents in ODF which will be a big step towards implementing the standard.

3.2 Upcoming

By 31 March 2015:

• HMRC will have completed the roll out of Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2013 to all staff users and new documents will be saved in ODF
• staff communications and training will have been delivered
• HMRC will review and put in place a schedule of engagement and support to establish our users (internal and external) training and support needs, including our handling of departments and external users who aren’t yet able to use ODF 1.2
• changes will be made to our intranet and collaboration (and social media channels) systems to allow storage of open standard documents
• HMRC will undertake a review of its speech recognition, screen reading, literacy, accessibility and dyslexia software and its integration with our Office suite to confirm its compliance with open standards for documents. A 3 to 6 month project will be set up to test the integration to ensure and confirm its anticipated interoperability with the HMRC Office suite

4. Phase 3 – Open document formats for integrated tools

HMRC will:

• review document version control labelling standards and ensure that an appropriate ODF compliant process solution is adopted by staff and is in place for the production and publication of all HMRC documents
• provide guidance to staff and users so that they understand the benefits of working with open formats and are supported during the change
• undertake a review of all of our in house ‘Business Developed Applications’ (BDAs) and their integration with HMRC’s office productivity tools. The review will assess their compatibility with ODF. We will decommission or update these BDAs on a rolling opportunistic basis to support the move to full ODF
• review and re-design training packages for use of Open Document Format in office productivity software
• seek an appropriate point in the technology or contract lifecycle to enable transition for current applications that don’t support the use of ODF formatted documents (eg some reporting tools)

5. Challenges and considerations

Items that we have identified that we will investigate and address as appropriate during the implementation phases:

• some internal ‘business developed applications’ will have compatibility issues with VBA code/certain formulae in ODF documents, we aim to drastically reduce the number of these applications
• whilst recognising that there is no requirement in the standards profile to convert legacy documents, we will review these with the aim of ensuring that when items are refreshed or replaced, the new standards are adhered to
• cost of change: the requirement to integrate use of ODF into business applications may be costly for some legacy applications
• technology alternatives: there will be an ongoing review of tools and services in the market to see if they can be used to better meet user needs
• training: all training packages to be reviewed and re-designed to emphasise digital by default processes and use of open formats (ODF and PDF/A) only