Microsoft's Open XML hits snag in standards process
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Blog: An ANSI committee created to formulate the United States position on ISO standardization does not recommend Open XML.
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The open source project to build a translator between Microsoft's new Office Open XML format and OpenDocument, the standard backed by OASIS, reached its first milestone Friday, releasing 1.0 of the technology for both Microsoft Word and competing ODF-compatible office suites.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has won approval for its Offfice Open XML document format from international standards body ECMA International. ECMA's General Assembly voted by 20-1 in favor of the standard at a meeting in Zurich on Thursday afternoon, and will now submit the format to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for its approval. The vote against came from a representative of IBM Corp. A standardized document format will make it easier for competing software companies to develop products that can interoperate with one another and to edit the same documents. Products meeting the standard could find favor with governments, or other organizations concerned about interoperability. Interoperability is vital for the preservation of archive information, according to Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library and a member of the committee that worked on the standard at ECMA. The British Library archives electronic documents, but must deal with whatever format they arrive in. The development of interoperable software tools will make that work easier. "The level of precision in this standard is unprecedented," Farquhar said. The standard runs to several thousand pages. To help developers digest the standard, the committee has published a 14-page white paper explaining it. "The committee put a lot of effort into making the document accessible," Farquhar said. That accessibility is important if Microsoft is to win developers over to its document format, as the company faces competition in the standards industry just as it does in the software market. A rival document format,Â OpenDocument Format (ODF), has already won approval from ISO, and was published as an ISO standard last month. ODF is used by office productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice, and has gained the support of other companies, including IBM. Government officials in France and the U.S. commonwealth of Massachusetts have recommended adoption of ODF as a government standard. ISO approval "is a critical factor for governments," said Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF Alliance, a body that promotes the OpenDocument Format. Microsoft's general manager for interoperability and XML (Extensible Markup Language) architecture, Jean Paoli, agrees that "some public institutions prefer standards that are ISO-certified." There are still several hurdles to overcome before Microsoft can obtain ISO approval. ECMA has asked that the standard be fast-tracked, a process to which national standards bodies now have about 30 days to object. If no one objects, then ISO Subcommittee 34 will spend five or six months examining comments on the standard received from the national standards bodies, and only then will the ISO's Joint Technical Committee 1 vote on the standard.
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Microsoft's Open XML format has won ECMA approval as a standard, giving Redmond, so often the opponent of open-source software, a better footing to compete with OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument Format (ODF).
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FRANKFURT/SEATTLE  - Microsoft Corp.  has  lost a preliminary vote to have its Office Open XML document  format approved as an international standard, denting the  company's hopes of wider adoption of the standard by  public-sector organizations.
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Ecma standards group considers developing a standard based on XML Paper Specification.
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Sunday, September 2 is the deadline for ISO member countries to vote on Microsoft's Office OpenXML -- the result will determine if it's approved as an international standard. Name calling, finger pointing and muckraking have sparked a debate over current standards-approval procedures and how they're affected by corporate influence. All this excitement over office docs?
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Fast track to nowhere Microsoft's PR machine is spinning a major setback into a minor victory for ratification of its proposed OOXML specification as an international standard.â¦
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Amid intense lobbying, Microsoft is expected to squeak out a victory this week to have its open document format, Office Open XML, recognized as an international standard.
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Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft&#39;s format and the possible standard.Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company&#39;s Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to &quot;promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers.&quot;The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft&#39;s Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML&#39;s rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
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Responding to requests, Microsoft will sponsor open-source project to build translators between older office formats and Open XML.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has failed in its attempt to have its Office Open XML document format fast-tracked straight to the status of an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization. The proposal must now be revised to take into account the negative comments made during the voting process. Microsoft expects that a second vote early next year will result in approval, it said Tuesday. A proposal must pass two voting hurdles in order to be approved as an ISO standard: it must win the support of two-thirds of voting national standards bodies that participated in work on the proposal, known as P-members, and also of three-quarters of all voting members. OOXML failed on both counts, according to figures provided by Microsoft, and by other sources with knowledge of the voting process. ISO has not yet officially announced the results. Microsoft could miss out on revenue from the lucrative government market if OOXML is also rejected next year. Some governments, worried that the need for access to electronic archives held in proprietary formats leaves them hostage to their software vendor, have mandated the use of document formats that comply with open international standards. Others are considering such a move, which could put Microsoft at a double disadvantage to open source products such as OpenOffice.org, which not only store files natively in the standardized Open Document Format, but are free.
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Massachusetts Monday proposed adding Microsoft-developed Open XML to its list of approved open documents formats.
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Microsoft says it simply wanted to allow interested organizations to participate in the Open XML standardization process, a company executive said Wednesday.
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Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format. In an open letter posted to its Web site, Microsoft claims IBM is trying to limit choice by pushing the OpenDocument Format.
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Opposition, abstentions emerge as the international standards group counts votes on Office Open XML.
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A technical committee in India has initially rejected the Open XML standard ahead of an ISO vote on making it an international standard.