You’ve most likely seen a lot of speculations on the ISO vote for Open XML. Brian Jones, part of the Office Productteam and heavily involved in Open XML officially confirms the vote :
APPROVED
(This is no April Foolsday joke ;-))
… I’m sure many folks have seen the news by now that Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard (IS 29500). Based on the numbers I’ve seen, looking at the P member countries there are now 24 who vote "yes", and only 8 vote "no". This puts the P member approval at 75% easily passing the 2/3 majority needed. Of the overall votes (both O and P members combined) 61 countries votes "yes" and only 10 voted "no" which puts the overall approval at 86% (so only 14% no). This puts us well below the minimum bar of no more than 25% voting "no". So on both criteria, Open XML now easily passes, which is a great indication of the general positive feelings amongst the national bodies of the progress made over the past 6 months.
Now that the voting over, it’s time to move forward and start to work together in the ongoing development of these document format standards. There has been a lot of energy focused on the review period over the past year or two, and we need to use that same energy to move us forward. There is still a lot of work to do in order to make it even easier for developers to build solutions using these standardized technologies (new tools; test suites; labs; etc.). We also need to continue looking beyond traditional documents and identify the important innovations that will be necessary for the documents of the future. I may have been a bit premature last year when I declared the file format wars over. It was a couple days after we saw that Open Office was going to have Open XML support, and I thought at that point folks would start to move on to the more collaborative and mutually beneficial investments. Well, I was a bit premature I think, but now a year removed from my initial statements, I think we’ve reached the milestone that really will help put a lot of the tension to rest. Open XML has been approved as an ISO standard, and we can now switch our energy back to the technical work that will continue to drive things forward. As we move into the next stages I’m excited to see the energy and knowledge that will be brought to the table as we begin to innovate and move both Open XML and ODF forward as important internationally standardized file formats. …
Continue at Source : Brian Jones : Open XML Formats
