Office Format Now ISO Standard

File formats similar to those of Office 2007 have been adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The decision helps fend off a threat to Microsoft and partners in government agencies, where critics have opposed use of Microsoft-defined formats for public documents. The decision could also encourage other software vendors to support the formats, simplifying integration with Office clients, but developers face high technical barriers.

Removing the Standards Card

The ISO’s decision is most important to Microsoft and partners who sell into government agencies, because it defuses an argument for the OpenOffice.org suite, a competitor to Office. The OpenOffice.org file formats had previously gained ISO standardization under the name of Open Document Format (ODF). This gave the competing suite an entry point to governments (such as the U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts), which require that public documents be archived in standard, vendor-independent formats. Microsoft responded to the threat on two fronts: It gained international standardization for Office-derived formats through Ecma International (which adopted “Office Open XML” in Dec. 2006) and now the ISO, and it supported an open source project to develop ODF plug-ins and conversion utilities for Office. (The ODF converters were updated most recently in Dec. 2007.)