Brazil, India, South Africa challenge Microsoft Open Office standard

Brazil, India and South Africa have challenged last month's decision by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) to ratify the Microsoft Office Open XML 2007 format as an international standard for electronic documents.

They argue that approval and implementation of OOXML could render older government documents unreadable by non-Microsoft products.

In their appeal filed with the ISO during the course of the week, technical agencies from Brazil, India and South Africa said the process that led to the ratification of Microsoft's Office Open XML format was flawed.

They criticised the ISO and IEC's fast-track approval process and complicated voting procedure and said all participants were not given enough time to make their views heard.

Brazilian officials said they were disappointed with the agency's decision to give its approval to OOXML format following a vote of member nations.

The International Electrotechnical Commission also clarified that three countries have protested the decision by the ISO last month to approve OOXML.

"By the deadline last night, we had received three appeals, from Brazil, India and South Africa," said Jonathan Buck, spokesman for IEC.

"The Indian appeal was not lodged in the correct procedure it was not send to the CEOs of the two organisations but nonetheless it has been received," Buck said, adding that it will be treated in the same way as the Brazilian and South African appeals.

A September meeting of the standards agencies had rejected approval for the Microsoft Office Open format and had suggested several changes to it.

Delegates at the February review meeting of the OOXML had just five days to deal with over 1,000 editorial changes and technical criticisms. Since then, many of the changes were put to a vote without discussion, and the final version of the text has still not been circulated to national standards bodies over a month after the deadline for publication set by Joint Technical Committee rules, they point out.

Member countries of the ISO accorded recognition to Microsoft Office Open XML by a 75 per cent vote in April. While 75 per cent of ISO member nations voted to approve OOXML as a standard, 14 per cent voted against the format and the rest abstained.

If a draft standard going through that process is rejected in an initial vote because it requires further work, a ballot resolution meeting (BRM) is called to discuss the criticisms made and improve the draft, the countries said in their appeal.

The European Commission, which had pledged support for ODF, meanwhile, said it would examine if the move could help loosen the software giant's stranglehold on the desktop applications market.

The EC's announcement came after Microsoft pledged to add ODF support to its Office 2007 desktop applications suite, which uses a version of OOXML as its default file format.

Microsoft said OOXML's ISO ratification would make it easier for developers and end users to work with the format and documents created with it. It also would make Microsoft Office products eligible for government procurement initiatives that require open standards.

OOXML competes with the Open Document Format, which previously won ISO approval. ODF is used in open source office productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org and IBM's Lotus Symphony package.

Microsoft last week said it would add support for ODF, as well as the XML Paper Specification, Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), and China's Uniform Office Format, to Office 2007 through a service pack slated for release in the first half of 2009.

The International Organisation for Standardisation and fellow standards organisation the International Electronics Commission (IEC) will now spend 30 days evaluating whether the appeals meet the necessary criteria. If so, the appeals will then be considered by the technical appeals committees of both organisations.