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ISO, IEC Purportedly Advise Rejecting OOXML Appeals
7/15/2008
The ISO/IEC 29500 standard has not been distributed yet, and Brazil complained that its lack of availability violates ISO's directives. Under the rules, all final versions of standards are supposed to be "distributed on not more than one month after the end of the BRM [Ballot Resolution Meeting]", said Brazil's complaint. The BRM was concluded at the end of February, meaning that four months have passed without distribution of the standard.
Ironically, Microsoft Office 2007 doesn't yet support the current ISO/IEC 29500 standard, even though it's based on Microsoft's OOXML technology. OOXML is a file format that is used in the Microsoft Office 2007 productivity suite, enabling interoperability and metadata exchange among programs such as Excel, PowerPoint and Word.
A rival document format standard, OpenDocument Format (ODF), has already been approved as ISO/IEC 26300. ODF is used in free productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org and Lotus Symphony. Microsoft plans to add support for ODF in future iterations of Microsoft Office.
The whole OOXML vs. ODF debate has been very important for government and educational institutions, many of which have saved their files using the older Microsoft Office file formats (.xls .ppt and .doc). They have institutional interests in seeing that their documents remain accessible -- long after the associated document formats become unsupported "old technology."
Kurt Mackie is online news editor, Enterprise Group, at 1105 Media Inc. You can contact Kurt at kmackie@1105media.com.
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