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On his very first day in office, President Obama signaled a commitment to transparency. But what good is opening access to documents if many of them are never preserved in the first place? Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains that an analog government is archiving a digital world.
This article would have benefitted greatly from an interview with an NARA archivist and with a rep from Microsoft. There are some legitimate reasons that the two do not play well together. I, too, am wary of the government's inability to archive, but there is more to this story than you indicated and these two viewpoints should have been represented.
So, um, OpenOffice.org Impress, part of the OpenOffice.org Office Suite, a free (GPL) Office Software Suite (created by Sun Microsystems and improved by many, and which is included free with most Linux distributions) that does much of what Microsoft Office does seems to do a decent job of converting PowerPoint (a format the National Archive isn't accepting according to the piece) to PDF (a format the National Archive is accepting according to the piece.)
A high school kid with decent Linux skills could set up a decent system for them in a few hours, so the comparison to starting a dotcom overestimates the task.
Quite apart from that, if they can store PDFs, they can store digital files in general (and storing unprocessed raw inputs would likely be good practice in any case, feasible when we contrast the present availability of multi terabyte disks with the fact that 15 years ago 1GB was on the large side). Processing any prticular might or might not be another matter, but the argument that they simply can't even store them is specious.
...oh...
http://www.openoffice.org/
[I'm not connected directly with them, so that's not spam.]
As I've mentioned before, I am confident that President Obama helped set up the community organizing projects' newsgroup used to organize the weekend conference and day of action where I first connected with he and Michele (or should I say the First Lady?) when he was still volunteering to assist the organizing project by which he was no longer employed (at least if the timeline of his career given by MSNBC in their documentary about his life is accurate).
[Loyalty to a cause even after the paycheck stops coming, where have I read about that before? Oh, yeah, that was me.]
I am equally confident that he will order an appropriate document and electronic program archive for the National Archives pretty quickly and efficiently. He seems like that kind of guy.
Chuck Piotrowski raises a good point: you didn't explore this issue very thoroughly.
What if government documents from the 1940s had all been printed on paper that required a special "viewing glass" from a big corporation, say The Hearst Company", to be read. That would probably be seen today as a boneheaded move on the part of the government, when plain old paper was available on the marketplace. PowerPoint and MS Word create files in proprietary formats that rely on the existence of Microsoft software to be decoded. What's the likelyhood that a historian in 200 years is going to be running Office 2003? Archivists are weary of data that is locked in the the tools of a particular vendor, particularly when perfectly functional open alternatives exist.
Now, perhaps their are also feet-dragging reasons for the archiving difficulties described here, but the digital preservation problem (i.e. what standards shall we use to insure that the data can be read in 10 years or 100 years?) is much more important, and it hasn't been solved yet with respect to defacto standards created by Microsoft.
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