ISO adopts OOXML format as international standard

April 1, 2008, 09:50 AM —  IDG News Service — 

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has adopted an international
standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.

The standard was approved by 86 percent of all countries voting, and by 75
percent of those countries participating in JTC1, the joint committee of the
ISO and the International Electrotechnical Committee that organized the vote,
according to a number of sources. To pass, it required the approval of 75 percent
of all countries voting, and 66 percent of those countries participating in
the committee, known as P-members.

Among the organizations relaying the information were Microsoft and industry
standards consortium ECMA International. Microsoft first sent its OOXML document
format to ECMA for approval, where it was adopted as standard
ECMA-376
. ECMA then submitted its standard to the ISO where, after numerous
modifications, it has been adopted as ISO standard 29500.

While the ISO has sent the ballot results to the national standards bodies,
it does not plan to announce them publicly until Wednesday.

The results were first disclosed in a document sent to the OpenDoc
Society mailing list
in a posting by a Dutch technical standards committee
member, Michiel Leenaars.

Of the 87 countries that voted, 61 approved, 10 disapproved and 16 abstained.
Among the P-members, 24 approved, eight disapproved and nine abstained, according
to the document.

Country Status Vote
Argentina Abstention
Armenia Approval
Australia P-Member Abstention
Austria Approval
Azerbaijan P-Member Approval
Bangladesh Approval
Barbados Approval
Belarus Approval
Belgium P-Member Abstention
Bosnia and Herzegovina Approval
Brazil Disapproval
Bulgaria Approval
Canada P-Member Disapproval
Chile Abstention
China P-Member Disapproval
Colombia Approval
Congo, The Democratic Republic of Approval
Costa Rica Approval
C

IDG News Service

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Resources
White Paper

Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.

Webcast

Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.

White Paper

Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.

Free stuff

VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise
By Edward L. Haletky
Published Dec 29, 2007 by Prentice Hall.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter

Green IT
By Toby Velte, Anthony Velte, Robert C. Elsenpeter
To be published Oct. 10, 2008 by McGraw Hill Professional
Enter now! | Official rules | About the book

Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

More Resources