As a follow-up on yesterdays quest to switch people to open standards, I contacted my university regarding their use of closed formats when contacting students. And I got good news!

I really feel strongly about the fact that the university only offers MS Office on their machines. Also, when filling out forms for making requests from the university board or other parts of the university, they e-mail you a .doc to fill out electronically.
So I have to go to the university to take care of this. If I want to work on a report with my fellow students at the university, I have to go .doc. I can't go home and keep working on it because they only offer MS Office.

I won't go through my entire rant again, but... You wouldn't send out .psd files to your friends. That would require them to go out and buy Photoshop to open that file! You send them .jpg, .png or whatever open format that is best for that picture. I have no doubt that this makes perfect sense to you - do yourself the favor and transfer that analogy to documents.

So I contacted the press department at SDU to hear what they had to say on this issue. And to my surprise, they are actually already in the process of making OpenOffice available to students! And not even just as an installation on the university computers - they will be offering a remote desktop which contains OpenOffice!

This is great news. The head of IT at SDU directed me to this article (in danish!) about the plans. Hopefully the system will be working well enough for students to use the service. I'm sure that not only will this make it a lot easier for students to work on the same document at the university as well as from home, but also some kind of collaborative element will be made available for students working on a shared project. And if the project is successful, other universities in Denmark are likely to use the same approach.

Kudos to SDU for making this service available! It will be opened to students at SDU on September 1st - I'll let you know how it works.