ISO puts off standardisation of Microsoft's Open Office XML format

Mumbai: The International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) has put its decision to declare Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format a global standard on hold, following appeals by four countries, including India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela.

The ISO secretary-general and the IEC general-secretary are currently considering the appeals, the agencies said.

ISO and the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC), which approved the OOXML file format as an international standard in April, had given participating countries two months time to appeal against the decision.

In their appeal, member countries India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela said the OOXML file format is not fully compatible with other document formats and hence cannot be a universal standard.

They also said the voting procedure was not satisfactory.

Further, they complained that the agencies adopted a fast-track process that gave members little time to discuss improvements in the format.

Microsoft's Open Office XML format, a default file-saving version of its Office 2007, ensures that documents, presentations and spreadsheet files are readable even if they are created using a significantly different programme.

Now, that investigation is on and the Open Office XML format is being kept on hold, global standardisation of the OOXML format may take many more months.

The ISO and the IEC are expected to take time till end-June to receive appeals. They may take a few more months for consultations and submission of the appeals along with their comments to the ISO Technical Management Board and the IEC Standardisation Management Board.

The management boards of the two organisations will then decide whether the appeals should be further processed or not. If they decide in favour of proceeding, the chairmen of the two organisations will then set up a conciliation panel, which will attempt to resolve the appeals. The process could take several months, says an ISO statement.

OOXML was originally disapproved in a 'fast-track vote' in September 2007. It was followed, as required under the rules, by a BRM at Geneva in February this year to address comments made by voting members.

India voted against the format at the BRM. However, when final votes were cast in April, OOXML got 75 per cent votes in its favour.

The 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.

If a draft standard 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, had also said it would examine if the move could help loosen the software giant's stranglehold on the desktop applications market.

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 Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) committee had disapproved a vote in April in its final verdict.

Indian software and services body Nasscom and IT majors TCS, Infosys and Wipro supported OOXML at BIS committee meetings while IBM, Sun Microsystems, Google, Department of IT, IIT-Bombay and IIM-Ahmedabad were in favour of the Open Document Format (ODF).

Microsoft, meanwhile continues to lobby for support to its OOXML format.