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Microsoft seeks to make Office Open XML an international open standard
Software vendor Microsoft Corp., US, has announced plans to offer Office Open XML (Extensible Markup Language), its document format technology, as an international open standard for the industry and the user community. The British Library, NextPage Inc., Barclays Capital, Intel Corporation, Apple, Statoil ASA, BP, Essilor and Toshiba will co-sponsor Microsoft’s submission of the standard to standards organisation Ecma International. In addition, Microsoft will create tools to transfer old documents to the open standard format. With the availability of the Office format as an open standard, customers can store and manage data for a long period, with a variety of vendors and tools to select from. This is projected to benefit the software environment, as software and services vendors worldwide can easily build solutions that are interoperable across a wide range of technologies. Industry leaders will work together as part of an open technical committee, which the members of Ecma can join to regulate, and fully document the Open XML formats for Excel, PowerPoint and Word from the subsequent generation of Office technologies, as an Ecma standard. They will also assist in maintaining the development of the formats. The group will request Ecma to submit its partnership results to the International Organization for Standardization for approval. Microsoft's Office formats are used in large numbers, with thousands of documents produced every minute. Over 300,000 developers have utilised the XML file formats in Office 2003 versions alone. With the new open standard, document contents can be accessed, explored, used, combined and developed in new, pioneering ways.
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