We’re lucky enough to have our services available on the G-Cloud, a new initiative by the UK Government’s Cabinet Office with the aim of breaking the sometimes monopolistic practices of ‘big IT’ when supplying government clients. We’ve recently had a couple of contracts procured via the G-Cloud iii framework and one of the requirements is to report whenever a client is invoiced. This is done via a website called Management Information Systems Online (MISO).
Part of the process is to input various mysterious Product Codes, and to find out what these were I downloaded a file from the MISO website. I use the Firefox browser and OpenOffice so I had assumed that opening this file would be a relatively simple process…perhaps unwisely.
Firstly, due to some quirk of the website and/or browser the file arrives with no file extension. I’m assuming it’s some kind of Microsoft Office document so I try renaming it to .xls as an Excel spreadsheet, and open it in OpenOffice Calc. This doesn’t work, as I end up with a load of XML in the spreadsheet cells. As it’s XML I wonder if it’s a newer, XML-powered Office format, so rename to .xlsx, but no, it seems that doesn’t work either. Opening up the file in a text editor shows it’s some kind of XML with Microsoft schemas abounding. At this point I tried contacting the MISO technical support department but they weren’t able to help.
A quick Google and I’ve discovered that the file is probably SpreadsheetML, a file format used before 2007 when Microsoft finally went the whole hog and embraced (well, forced everyone else to embrace) their own XML-based standard for Office documents. The latter format is something OpenOffice can easily read, so I try renaming the file as .xml and importing it. OpenOffice now tells me "OpenOffice.org requires a Java runtime environment (JRE) to perform this task. The selected JRE is defective."
This is now taking far too long. After some more research I discover what this actually means is OpenOffice needs a version of Java 6 (now discouraged by Oracle). I have to register for an Oracle account to even download it. Finally, Open Office is able to read the file and I can now fill in the original form.
If anything this process proves that central government has a long way to go towards adopting open standards and using plain, widely adopted file formats. The G-Cloud framework is a great step forward – but some of the details still need some work.
Why don’t they just use a web form and let you fill it in on-line? Since that’s how I order pretty well everything from Airline tickets to computer bits and pieces why can’t they just do like all other internet retailers do?
No idea, Ian…I think things are slowly improving though across the board, for example the original Cloudstore wasn’t built on open source, now it is.