BANGALORE, INDIA: XML is now poised to consolidate its position as the dominant format for high value business data according to Dr Alex Brown, director of Griffin Brown, an industry leading data quality specialist and convenor of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Ballot Resolution Process.

Dr Brown commented, "Despite the huge controversy surrounding it, the standardisation of Open Office XML (OOXML) is great news for business. As the large majority of organisations in the developed world use Microsoft desktop applications, it is a significant step forward that data held within these documents can now be accessed by any XML tool. This finally opens the way for legacy documents to be accessible for compliance, audit trail, archiving and even migration to other, non-Microsoft, systems."

ISO/IEC DIS 29500 was originally developed as the Office Open XML Specification by Microsoft Corporation which submitted it to Ecma International, an information technology industry association, for transposing into an ECMA standard and subsequently published as ECMA standard 376.

Ecma International then submitted the standard in December 2006 to ISO/IEC JTC 1, with whom it has category A liaison status, for adoption as an International Standard.

Since it is based on XML, Office Open XML is a platform-independent standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets. The standard, which has been trialed by hundreds of organisations, has now received the necessary votes for approval as an International Standard.

Independent software vendors, including Apple, Corel, Microsoft and Novell have already shipped implementations of the Open XML standard within popular applications such as iWork, iPhone, WordPerfect, Open Office and Microsoft Office 2007. The new standard will ensure that billions of documents created during the last twenty years, will continue to be forwards compatible with new technologies and applications.

Dr Brown went on to say, "We are reaching the mature stage of the Information Economy where successful organisations rely upon data to support their core business. Now that OOXML is to become one of ISO's standard document formats alongside PDF and ODF, it brings previously opaque office content into a format where it can reused and repurposed, while monitoring and improving its quality."