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June 10, 2008

In all, 4 countries have appealed a decision designed to accelerate the global standardization of a Microsoft document format, called OpenXML.

In the past two weeks, Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela have all complained that there wasn't enough time given to discuss improvements to the open document format.

The new document format is used for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Microsoft critics claim it's not fully compatible with other document formats.

Overall, the ratification of OpenXML would be an important seal of approval for Microsoft, which has long been held to task for its failure to embrace open standards as a whole.

Increasingly, government bodies would be more likely to adopt the standard if it had an 'open rubber-stamp' as many are concerned that storing documents in a proprietary format could cause problems for future archiving.

Initially, Microsoft's Office OpenXML format was approved by ISO (The International Organisation for Standardization) two months ago but will now remain on hold while the appeals are being investigated by various ISO officials.

Some IT industry observers say this could take several months. Microsoft has been working towards a more open way of formatting documents based around the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in response to requests from government customers.

Microsoft's repeated attempts to have the OpenXML format officially recognized as interoperable has triggered a lot of controversy in the IT sector, and especially in the Linux community.

Case in point: the BSI British Standards voted in favour of adopting it but now faces a legal challenge from the UK's Unix and Open Systems User Group.

Generally speaking, open standards would help preserve the structure of data in a specific document such as a spreadsheet or word processor file, so that relationships between figures are preserved as they are opened in different programs or used for other purposes.

UKUUG chairman Alain Williams says "Microsoft's proposed data format used for storage of documents will affect our lives for many decades to come. It is thus imperative that standards such as OpenXML are given a rigorous review rather than just being 'rubber-stamped' by the people at BSI.

Source: Signal vs Noise.

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