Microsoft stumbles in Open XML standards vote
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Open XML fails to get majority needed to get ISO ratification, although the process can continue.
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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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An employee at Microsoft's Swedish subsidiary offered to pay partners to vote to approve the Office Open XML document format as an ISO standard, the company admitted Wednesday.
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A major milestone approaches on Microsoft's document standards gambit but participants say that a final resolution won't happen any time soon.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ has achieved a small victory in itsÂ effort to make Open XML an open technology standard. Massachusetts, the U.S. state that has mandated the use of open technology formats in its government agencies, has put the specification on its list of possible standards that can be used for documents, according to a document on its Web site. The current 4.0 version of the state's Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) -- a framework defining where standards will be used and which ones are permissible -- lists Ecma-376 Office Open XML Formats (Open XML) as an acceptable "open format." The state is adding Open XML to a short list that also includes OASIS Open Document Format For Office Applications (ODF) v. 1.1, the current version of the rival standard supported by IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others. Bethann Pepoli, acting CIO for Massachusetts, said Monday that Open XML was added to the list because it now meets the commonwealth's criteria for an open standard, which requires that formats "are publicly available and are developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body." Massachusetts has been releasing a revision to the ETRM every six months, and in December when the last version was released Open XML had only recently been approved by Ecma and did not have the required industry support, she said. Massachusetts residents have until July 20 to comment on the current draft of the ETRM. Microsoft submitted Open XML toÂ Ecma InternationalÂ in November 2004, and the standards organization hasÂ approved a final version of the specification. The International Organization for Standards (ISO) is expected to vote on the Ecma version of Open XML later this year. ODF already has been approved by the ISO as an international technology standard. In a statement through its public-relations firm Monday, Microsoft applauded the addition of Open XML to the Massachusetts list, saying it gives users "the ability to choose the open file format standard that best serves their needs." When Microsoft submitted Open XML to Ecma, the company said it was in part to make the document format Microsoft developed in house for its Office 2007 suite a more viable option for governments and other institutions that are beginning to standardize only on technology formats that are available for anyone to use. But critics -- mainly those who support ODF as in favor of Open XML as the standard for documents -- have complained that Microsoft has been too controlling when it comes to the Ecma standards process, ensuring the technology it submitted as a "standard" looked the way Microsoft wanted it to at the end of the approval process. And since the company didn't allow third parties to create implementations of Open XML before it was submitted, critics say Microsoft has misused the standards process, which is meant to be more open. One of those most outspoken critics, IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards Bob Sutor, Monday spoke out in favor of Massachusetts decision to let its residents review Open XML alongside other formats. However, he took a dig at Microsoft with a reminder that the ETRM is still only in draft form and that opposition remains to the state's decision to use Open XML as a standard. Â
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No fast-tracking for you, sonny Google has proved unable to restrain itself from gloating over the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) decision not to approve Microsoft's request that the OOXML specification be fast-tracked for approval.â¦
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Regulators at the European Union have asked Microsoft for information on Microsoft lobbying on an ISO Open XML vote in September.
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Microsoft Corp. has failed in a first step to win enough support to make the data format behind its flagship Office software a global standard, the International Standards Organization said Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - You might think the steady defeat of bills in several U.S. states to mandate the use of free interoperable file formats might dampen the spirits of IBM, one of the prime supporters ofÂ ODF (OpenDocument Format). Far from it, said IBM's Bob Sutor, who sees the recent news as par for the course in the evolution of any open standard. Last week, California became the latest U.S. state to stall or shelve proposed legislation to require its agencies to adopt open file formats like ODF instead of Microsoft's proprietary Office formats. Similar bills in Connecticut, Florida, Texas, and Oregon have met with the same fate, while Minnesota only passed legislation after it was changed from a mandate to use an open format to a call for the state's IT department to investigate the issue. Massachusetts, the first and so far only, U.S. state with a policy on using open formats, shifted that position somewhat last year to order the adoption of plug-ins to enable Office users to create and save files in ODF. In an interview earlier this week, Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM, talked about ODF and Microsoft's rival Office Open XML document standard. IDGNS: What's your take on the defeat of legislation in several U.S. statesÂ that would've mandated the use of open document formats? Is it a setback for the adoption of ODF? Sutor: We've seen this before around open standards. Take the Web itself. It went mainstream in about 1994 to 1995. If you trace it back, the Web was starting in the late 1980s. It takes most technology standards between 5 to 10 years to become established. They start in committees, come into their own, and then commercial interests come in. Web services kicked off in 2000, and we saw SOAÂ in 2004 to 2005. Now, no one doubts that SOA is big business. In the same way, if you look back at ODF, you can go back to 2003 or 2005. It's still very, very early. We wouldn't have thought it possible in 2005 that in 2007 there would even be any legislative considering of ODF. It's great that people are even talking about this in the first place. It's extremely early. Legislative committee talks take time. One year, a member proposes something, they meet that year on it, and the next meeting isn't until the next year. In some states like Texas they only meet every other year. I certainly expect the legislation to come back with a vengeance in the next sessions. Also, government IT policy makers aren't waiting for legislation, they're making active decisions. Changes are under way. Minnesota's bill will give a strong lead to other states. IDGNS: Where do you think ODF is at in terms of your prediction of five to 10 years for a standard to establish itself? Sutor: We're at about year three or four. IDGNS: It seems as though IBM and Microsoft are pitted against each other with ODF versus Microsoft's OpenXML. Sutor: The only one talking about a feud between Microsoft and IBM is Microsoft. On the ODF side, it's not just us, but we're a such a big company, we're going to say something. There's nothing whatsoever about ODF that particularly enables IBM. OpenOffice [an open-source office rival to Microsoft's Office] benefits; that's not our baby, we don't control it. We've put ourselves in a position where [with ODF] there are all the potential benefits of open source. It's interchangeability along with interoperability so if someone doesn't want to use someone's software, they can choose to use something else. I absolutely don't see this as a feud for Microsoft and IBM. We provide chips for the Xbox, we have a large, if not the biggest, services business around .Net. There's no feud. ODF is in the Oasis [standards body]. Microsoft is on the board of directors of Oasis and has steadfastly refused to participate in ODF. We're happy for them to join and would welcome them with open arms. IDGNS: Some potential users would like to see one single standard, a combination of ODF and OpenXML. Could that ever be a possibility? Sutor: It's more a difference in technology. Microsoft XML technology is simply not good XML. Look at the English language. It's a bunch of letters, words, and grammar, and you can use the rules to form sentences. That's similar to XML. You can sit down to write a novel, and so can I. I might write the worst novel, and you write the best. Just using XML doesn't guarantee quality in the same way that using English doesn't guarantee great novels. Microsoft's XML doesn't take into account modern design and steadfastly ignores other XML standards. I have a sneaking suspicion that OpenXML isn't the last format we'll hear from Microsoft. It's totally a personal thing, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a new XML from Microsoft in a few years and one with an architecture a lot like ODF. I could then see a natural convergence which could bring the two together.
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(InfoWorld) - The Swedish Standards Institute has declared its recent vote in favor of Microsoft's Office Open XML format invalid. It means that Sweden will probably abstain from an important upcoming international vote on whether to make the format a standard. The reason given by SIS was not the controversial circumstances surrounding the vote, in which Microsoft was found to have offered companies "incentives" if they voted in favor of OOXML. Instead, SIS cited a technicality, saying proper procedures had not been followed. "It appears that one of the organizations that took part had two votes. Since the rules weren't followed, the decision made earlier is void," SIS president Lars Flink told IDG's Computer Sweden. A new vote will now be held. It probably won't be possible to arrange it by Sunday, however, the deadline for countries to submit their votes on whether to standardize the format to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO will then tally the results and publish the result early next week, possibly by Monday. "The board of SIS knows that there is not much time, which means that Sweden won't take part [in the ISO vote], although we won't know for certain until Sunday," Flink said. He denied that the storm of criticism directed at the vote was behind SIS's decision to declare its vote invalid. "The vote has been criticized, but that is not the reason for our decision," he said. "The sole reason is that one of the companies that voted cast more than one vote. No member company has more than one vote." The original decision to accept OOXML as an ISO standard was taken by the Swedish working group on Monday. Microsoft Sweden was later found to have offered extra "marketing contributions" to its business partners to encourage them to vote for OOXML, according to e-mails seen by Computer Sweden. A Microsoft manager said this week that the e-mail "should never have been sent." SIS said it is now "practically and formally impossible for the Swedish working group to arrange a new vote before September, 2, 2007, when the global vote is closed. If a new Swedish vote cannot be arranged, Sweden will abstain from voting." About 100 countries will take part in the vote. OOXML is Microsoft's rival to the Open Document Format (ODF), which is used by applications including OpenOffice.org and Star Office. ODF has already been adopted by the ISO as an international standard, but Microsoft is pushing ISO to have OOXML adopted as well.
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Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML file format won approval from the Ecma International standards body. The vote could make it easier for users and vendors to justify supporting both Open XML and the rival OpenDocument format.
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InfoWorld - It may be Valentine&#39;s Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM.
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Did Redmond try to pack standards groups? Microsoft's failed attempt to get its Office Open XML (OOXML) file format adopted by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) could land the software giant in hot water with the European Commission (EC).â¦
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Microsoft's bid to win fast-track ISO standard status for its Open XML file format didn't get enough votes, which means the proposal will have to be modified and put to a second round of balloting early next year.
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Microsoft's Office Open XML format, which was introduced in Office 2007 and already certified by European standards body Ecma International, hit a speed bump Friday on its "Fast Track" process to becoming a worldwide ISO standard.
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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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Sharepoint is getting an open-source webpart.  This is good for Microsoft and for its customers.  It could be better, though....