Why have another document standard?

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There are a number of great reasons for this - but the first and most important point to make is that Ecma Office Open XML is already a standard today ratified by Ecma.  The current discussion is whether it should be ratified as an international (ISO/IEC) standard.  Not to mention there are many ISO approved document standard out there today but more on that in a later post.

The top four reasons from our point of view to have this as an international standard are:

  1. PROTECTING OUR HERITAGE - enabling and guaranteeing ongoing access to valuable legacy documents. It provides freedom from dependence on specific applications, vendors or platforms in order to exchange documents.
  2. SECURING OUR FUTURE - providing choice and encouraging competition in the marketplace – facilitating interoperability and platform independence.
  3. FOSTERING INNOVATION - enabling the New Zealand IT industry to provide new and innovative solutions for sale locally and worldwide.
  4. CREATING A PUBLIC GOOD - stewardship and ownership of the standard has been moved from the vendor (Microsoft) to a neutral, internationally-recognised standards organisation (Ecma).

Open XML can and will co-exist with existing and future open document standards.

Ecma also supports this point of view and a summary of their document (with link to original) is here: https://www.openxmlcommunity.org/summary.aspx

 

It's really interesting to look at the Ecma members here are a couple of screens grabs from their site - not the typical Microsoft fraternity but a good industry cross section.

 

https://www.ecma-international.org/memento/members.htm

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Just looking at the Ordinary members alone...

https://www.ecma-international.org/memento/ordinary.htm

 

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Microsoft has passed this document format onto Ecma for it's stewardship - we have also done this in the past and it's been a positive thing for the industry.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2007
    Speaking of Tech Ed 2007, some of the discussions I had with ISVs revolved around Office Open XML and

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2007
    Speaking of Tech Ed 2007, some of the discussions I had with ISVs revolved around Office Open XML and