OOXML Winning the ISO Standards War

Try as some might to stop it, it looks like Microsoft may soon be celebrating the official recognition of its OOXML document standard as an international standard by the ISO.

The International Standards Organization has rejected several appeals challenging the ratification as OOXML as an international standard. The ISO approved the standard on April 2 subject to no official appeals within the following two months.

There were of course appeals however from India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela - all national standards body members. Represented by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), India had said no to OOXML since the beginning.

The battle all along has really been between ODF (Open Document Format) and OOXML (Open Office XML format). Many believe you can't have more than one official standard, and ODF has already been ratified. It does appear that many others believe more than one is not going to hurt.

We should expect to the see the OOXML standard officially announced as final within the next few weeks as final processing of the document is completed and no one else decides to raise an appeal.

At that point, Microsoft may then start to see further inroads into the government sector as they prefer to use products ratified by official standards bodies.

Of course it will be interesting to see how fast they support their own standard once it does become official. As it stands now, Microsoft Office will support ODF but not OOXML in the next Service Pack due out next year.

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