Microsoft OOXML Document Format Wins Approval
Microsoft OOXML Document Format Wins Approval
April 2, 2008: The final skirmish has come to a surprisingly bloodless conclusion in the document format battle that Microsoft has been fighting since 2005, with the announcement that Office Open XML has won the ISO vote.
Office Open XML, or OOXML as it’s become widely known, is a file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, charts and electronic presentations. The format has been developed by Microsoft and the company launched a bid in 2005 to have OOXML standardised and formally approved by the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO).
The bid to have OOXML standardised has become an ongoing source of controversy over the years, with many different players having vested interests in what becomes the official standard of the future. Microsoft’s sternest competition came from the Open Document Format (ODF) which garnered a large wave of supporters.
The primary supporter of the ODF was the Open Document Foundation, who had been pressing the case of its namesake strongly in an attempt to thwart the Microsoft juggernaut. The support for the ODF seemed to crumble in late 2007 when the foundation announced it was shutting shop and threw an endorsement behind a third format from the W3C which caused further confusion.
This isn’t to say the process was all smooth sailing for Microsoft, their attempts to have the standardisation of OOXML fast-tracked were rebuffed and their were times where it looked like ODF had gained enough momentum to pull the rabbit out of the hat and win out.
Concluding 14 months of review, the vote has come down in favour of OOXML who obtained 86% of the votes from various national bodies, exceeding the required 75% or better for formal acceptance, though the formal announcement won’t be made until Wednesday.
“The input from technical experts, customers and governments around the world has greatly improved the Open XML specification and will make it even more useful to developers and customers,” said Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft Corp.
“Once it is formally approved, we are committed to supporting this specification in our products, and we will continue to work with standards bodies, governments and the industry to promote greater interoperability and innovation.”
Microsoft explains that OOXML formats are capable of integrating with other types of documents while maintaining a clean separation of presentation (Open XML markup) and data. This means organisations are able to use Open XML to report information from other applications and systems without having to translate it first.