April 1st, 2008

OOXML said to win ISO standardization approval with 75 percent of the vote

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:56 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Legal, Office, Office 2007, SharePoint Server

Tags: ISO, Mailing List, OOXML, Iso standards, Process Improvement, Quality, Business Operations, Mary Jo Foley

While ISO isn’t set to announce the official voting tally until tomorrow, the OpenDoc Society has posted to a mailing list what it claims are the final results indicating that Microsoft will be granted ISO approval for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.

According to the alleged results page, OOXML received a 75 percent “approve” total. It needed 66.66 percent to become an ISO standard. Here is the alleged ISO ballot information on OOXML (zipped PDF file).

ISO officials aren’t commenting on the leaked ballot tally. Nor is Microsoft. ISO officials said on March 31 that they planned to notify privately the national bodies who participated in the standards vote before publicizing the final results on April 2.

Update: Microsoft is now confirming (in a rather long-winded way) that OOXML won the vote for ISO standards approval. From the company’s April 1 press release:

“While the final vote has not yet been announced formally, publicly available information shows overwhelming support for Open XML. According to documents available on the Internet, 86% of all national body members support ISO/IEC standardization, well above the 75% requirement for formal acceptance under ISO and IEC rules. In addition, 75% of the Participating national body members (known as P-members) support standardization, also well above the required 66.67% requirement for this group.

“Open XML, IS29500, now joins HTML, PDF and ODF as ISO- and IEC-recognized open document format standards.

“The ratification of Open XML is proof that the consensus-building process worked.”

OOXML is currently an ECMA standard. Microsoft has been advocating for OOXML to receive ISO standard status, as that is seen as more of a “gold” standard by many governments when evaluating standards compliance of new software.

In a note sent to its mailing list recipients, OpenDoc Society Board Member Michiel Leenaars portrayed the alleged OOXML victory as having “minimal”impact on OOXML vs. Open Document Format (ODF) adoption. Leenaars wrote:

“OOXML which was submitted by Microsoft to ECMA, and by ECMA to ISO, has literally crawled through the needles eye. After a year of discussion and repairs it still receives the very minimum of support. The BRM convinced some yet unconvinced others, and counter votes from large countries like China, India, Brazil, Canada, South Africa and Iran speak volumes. This must be one of the worst results ever for a standard to pass within ISO/JTC1 in years.

“Appartently (sic) the chair from the Norwegian comitte(e) has filed a protest against the national outcome. Although one vote would not make much difference, others may follow.”

(Thanks to ITWire for the link to the mailing list post.)

Update on April 2: Here’s the official ISO statement on OOXML obtaining standards approval.