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ISO Meeting to Decide OOXML's Fate


By David Worthington
February 26, 2008 — 
National standards bodies will convene in Geneva this week for a ballot resolution meeting with the hope of reaching consensus over what modifications should be made to the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification before it is resubmitted to ISO for another vote by participating nations. This week’s meeting will influence the adoption of OOXML, and the future development of Microsoft Office.

The company began lobbying in late 2005 to have its XML-based document formats approved as ISO standards. Although Ecma International passed OOXML virtually without comment, the response from ISO participants has been lukewarm at best. In September 2007, Microsoft failed to attract support from enough ISO member nations to permit the fast-track approval of OOXML as an ISO standard.

Since then, Microsoft has embarked on a major interoperability initiative and has taken steps to placate dissenting members, including making documentation about its binary Office formats more accessible for developers.

Ecma International will play a prominent role in this week’s ISO meeting, which runs through Friday. Its Technical Committee 45, the group steering Open XML through ISO, was tasked with addressing comments made by ISO members that took part in reviewing the specification and will revise OOXML based on the feedback.

ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 34 is the body responsible for document description and processing languages standards; it has designated OOXML as ISO/IEC draft international standard 29500. ISO will vote on OOXML again next month if this week’s meeting results in a consensus on what to change.

Should Enterprises Adopt a Specification That May Change?
The topic of format change is often a buzz-kill in document archiving circles. Microsoft has acknowledged that OOXML may evolve, and that evolution may require it to modify the Office formats yet again.

Burton Group research director and vice president Guy Creese said that it was up to enterprises to decide whether to wait for the OOXML standard to mature or standardizing on it now, but noted that they could begin using it today to take advantage of the benefits of using an XML file format standard over binary file formats.

Perhaps the uppermost of these, according to analyst Michael Cherry with research firm Directions on Microsoft, is that XML has a more easily parsed format as well as more readable.

“This is similar,” Creese wrote in an e-mail, “to asking, ‘Should I use [Open Document Format] now, or wait for ODF 1.2?’ It's always a judgment call, but waiting for significant maturity means not being able to take advantage of the standard in the meantime, and we think the XML file format standards (whether ODF or OOXML) offer significant benefits over the binary file formats.”

Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft, admitted that even the company would be in the dark as to the final contents specification, until the entire ISO process is completed. Microsoft is committed to making changes to the Office family over time to reflect changes in the OOXML format, he said.

When asked whether enterprises would have difficulty moving from one version of OOXML to another, he replied via e-mail, “Open XML is built on the XML standard, and as such documents created in Open XML will always be able to be read by other applications on multiple platforms [that can read its schemas]. Standards always evolve and the evolution of existing standards (such as Ecma 376 Office Open XML evolving to an ISO standard) is a fact that the industry at large knows how to accommodate.”

IDC vice president Melissa Webster said that, according to her research, enterprise buyers are motivated by the need to support legacy file formats—not by the strengths or weaknesses of the underlying document format. She added that revisions demanded as part of the ISO process could only improve the specification.

“Customers today are buying Office 2007 the product suite—not OOXML the format,” she explained in an e-mail. “I'd say there's a high level of trust that Microsoft will ensure backward compatibility for legacy docs (Office docs, especially). I would be very surprised if Microsoft backed off that promise.”

Paoli claimed that hundreds of ISVs have already implemented OOXML in their solutions, including Apple, Intel and Novell, adding that this acceptance is evidence that the specification is manageable and widely supported.

He also asserted that OOXML has cross-platform appeal, citing the work of Linux vendors, including Novell, towards enabling document interoperability between OOXML and Open Document Format as an example.

That said, Microsoft is still working toward interoperability with itself. Windows-based users with Office 2000, XP and 2003 finally got a stable set of conversion tools in November. Even after repeated delays, Microsoft has yet to deliver an Office Open XML file format converter for Mac Office 2004. In a Feb. 21 blog entry, the Mac Business Unit revealed that the converter’s release had been pushed back to accommodate shipping updates to Office 2008, which shipped in January.

Office 2004 customers must continue to use the Office binary formats, or use a beta version of the converter. A spokesperson was unavailable for comment by presstime.

Interoperability Is the Watchword
Some ISO members asked Microsoft to take steps to make it easier to obtain information about the Office binaries over the Web, prompting the company to respond by adding the binary formats for Office Excel, PowerPoint and Word to its Open Specification Promise (OSP) on Feb. 15. It is also issuing patent rights and sponsoring tools that are designed to ensure that the formats are legally benign and highly interoperable with OOXML.

OSP, says Microsoft, is an irrevocable promise not to sue developers for using Microsoft patents while they are implementing a covered specification. Developers can create mappings between the binary formats and OOXML to translate documents written in either scheme.

The documentation for the Office binary formats was already available to all comers under the RAND-Z (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory with zero royalty) program since 2006, but interested parties formerly had to e-mail Microsoft to get it. It is now downloadable directly from Microsoft’s Web site.

Microsoft has also sponsored Office Binary Translator to Open XML, an open-source project at SourceForge tasked with creating tools and offering guidance on how to convert a document written in the binary formats to OOXML.

Last Thursday, the company revealed a grander vision for interoperability in the wake of mounting pressure from European antitrust regulators. It plans to publish documentation for APIs from select high-volume products including the Office family and Windows client and server protocols.

As part of this pledge, Microsoft is adopting four principles of interoperability: to ensure open connections, to promote data portability, to enhance support for industry standards, and to more openly engage its customers and the industry, including open-source communities.

In doing so, Microsoft will create new APIs for Office 2007 client applications, to address data exchange between widely used document formats. It plans to allow developers to plug in additional document formats and to set those formats as the defaults for documents.

A spokesperson said that the APIs will ship as part of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, due sometime in 2009.


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