Open XML Gets ISO Approval to Become a Standard

Published: April 3, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft won a key battle over acceptance of its Office Open XML, or OOXML, document standard yesterday when the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, announced that it passed a recent ratification vote among members. The vote was a big win for Microsoft, which has struggled to promote Office 2007's new file format in the face of Open Document Format (ODF), a competing XML-based standard, increased scrutiny from government regulators, and a previous rejection by the ISO. However, legal hurdles to its adoption remain.

Just six months ago, Microsoft's efforts to fast-track Open XML into a standard were slapped down when ISO voting members rejected the file format amid reports that Microsoft was taking steps (perhaps unethically) to influence the outcome of the vote.

Even at that time, however, it appeared likely that the ISO would eventually vote to make Open XML a standard, which is what the 87 voting bodies did in late February. According to yesterday's ISO announcement, 86 percent of the voters voted in favor of ratifying Open XML as a standard during February's vote. Those results became final March 29, when the 30-day waiting period that ISO gives to voters to change their minds elapsed, thus sealing Open XML's fate as full-blown standard.

Microsoft applauded the ratification. "This outcome is a clear win for the customers, technology providers, and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs and have a voice in the evolution of this widely adopted standard," Tom Robertson, general manager of interoperability and standards at Microsoft, stated in a press release.

There is still a possibility of a legal challenge of the ISO vote to make Open XML a standard. In fact, some employees at Microsoft are expecting a challenge, which must be filed in the next two months or Open XML becomes a standard by default. In his blog Monday, Jason Matusow said he expects a legal challenge against the standardization of Open XML. However, a challenge is not necessarily a bad thing, he says.

"We now see IBM et al driving an orchestrated process attack in the hopes of overturning the ratification of Open XML, or at least to discredit what has come out of this long, global process," Matusow writes. "While I certainly hope they are not successful in this attempt, I do respect the right of anyone to raise questions about the process."

Microsoft's Open XML format also faces scrutiny from the European Commission, which opened a new investigation in January to see if the company is doing enough to promote interoperability among several products, including Office 2007 and its Open XML file format.

For its part, Microsoft has been spending millions to promote itself as a champion of interoperability and openness, and taking some action, too. In late February, just as the ISO vote was kicking off, Microsoft unveiled its "four principals of openness," in which it made a slew of promises to work more closely with the open source community, including giving them alternatives to using Open XML.

Open XML was introduced as the new standard document file format starting with Office 2007 products. Compared to existing binary .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats used with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Open XML has the advantage of separating the data from the presentation (which is, of course, the whole point of XML). The benefit of this approach is that it provides standard XML-based methods for third-party application developers to generate and read Office files, without having to resort to the sometimes-cumbersome binary Office file formats.

Open XML was originally submitted to the ISO for Microsoft in December 2006 by Ecma International, a promoter of IT standards, as ECMA 376. At the ISO, the standard has become known as ISO/IEC 29500.

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