Microsoft Offers Office Document Formats to Ecma International for Open Standardization
PARIS — Microsoft Corp. today announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind billions of documents to customers and the industry as an international standard. Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba will co-sponsor a submission to Ecma International, the standards organization, of the Microsoft Office Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) document format technology. Furthermore, Microsoft will make available tools to enable old documents to capitalize on the open standard format. With Office document formats available as an open standard, customers will have even more confidence in their ability to store and manage data for the long term, with many more vendors and tools from which they can choose. The move will benefit the broader software ecosystem because software and services vendors worldwide will be able to more easily build compelling solutions that interoperate across a broad spectrum of technologies.
These global industry leaders have agreed to work together as part of an open technical committee that Ecma members can join to standardize and fully document the Open XML formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the next generation of Office technologies, code-named Office “12,” as an Ecma standard, and to help maintain the evolution of the formats. The group will ask Ecma to submit the results of their collaboration to the International Organization for Standardization for approval.
Ceci est bon! Un Monde, une norme de XML....
Q&A: Microsoft Co-Sponsors Submission of Office Open XML Document Formats to Ecma International for Standardization
Standardizing the Microsoft Office Open XML formats : BrianJones
Here are two points I really want to stress:
- It has always been our goal to make customer data in documents more valuable to them. By working with customers and partners at ECMA, we can continue these efforts to build out the Office ecosystem and help our customers reuse their XML data across systems and applications. This effort also opens up a lot of opportunities for us as well as commercial opportunities for other companies.
- Some customers, particularly in the public sector, have been telling us that they would like us to take this step. They are focused on the long-term management and archiving of digital records and want to use our document formats. They have told us that they would like to see us pursue this step as a measure of goodwill toward them and their interests and we are now following through on their request.