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The Microsoft Office Open XML is a primary file format to be used by the upcoming release of Microsoft Office (currently known as Office "12"). Microsoft has stated it will be an open standard, and has announced plans to submit it for ECMA standardization process and later to ISO. ECMA announced Dec 9, 2005 that it had accepted Microsoft's proposal to document the standard. The ECMA technical committee producing the standard is comprised of representatives from Apple, the British Library, Canon, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Pioneer, Statoil ASA and Toshiba.
Microsoft also published a "covenant not to sue" covering IP rights it has in the new format. This covenant is very similar in wording to the one Sun provided for Open Document Format (ODF).
Certain computer vendors (competitors to Microsoft) have characterized it as an attempt to derail the Open Document Format (ODF), and have criticized Microsoft's standardization and other promises as falling short of what is needed to create a vendor-neutral open standard. In particular, they have criticized the incompatibility of its license terms with the GPL license used by a large body of Free and Open-source software. For its part Microsoft claims that its covenant not to sue is sufficient for GPL implementation, and notes that software covered by the GPL such as OpenOffice already supports WordProcessingML. It also notes that ODF is largely a standardization of the existing OpenOffice/StarOffice format and so is not truly a multi-vendor effort.
Microsoft's Open XML format is similar to ODF, in that both represent a ZIP container for XML and other data files. However, it has been criticized on a technical level by members of the ODF community for reflecting the internal data structures of the word processing application more closely than that of the document structure, and of not using the XML data model as cleanly as ODF. For its part, Microsoft has pointed out apparent deficiencies and incompleteness in the ODF spec, such as around formulas in spreadsheets. Microsoft maintains that its primary goal has to be backwards compatibility with existing documents and full support of its extensive feature set, which ODF does not support. A full analysis of the relative merits of the formats addressing the concerns of both viewpoints has not been done by anyone, although many claims have been made one way or the other. For for information on this subject see Comparison of OpenDocument with Microsoft XML formats.
External links
Microsoft documents and blog postings
- Ecma International Standardization of OpenXML File Formats Frequently Asked Questions
- Microsoft Office Open XML Formats Overview
- Microsoft Office Open XML Formats Frequently Asked Questions
- Brian Jones: Office XML Formats
- Office "12" XML Schema Reference - PDC 2005 Preview
Other viewpoints
- Groklaw: Format comparison between ODF and MS XML
- ZDNet: Rosen approves Microsoft Office format license (Who is Rosen?)
- eWeek: Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball
- Sun - Peter Korn: Why won't Microsoft join existing standards efforts?
- eWeek: Microsoft's Standards Are No Standards at All
- ZDNet: Massachusetts to adopt 'open' desktop
- ZDNet: Massachusetts warms to Microsoft Office standard
- eWeek: Microsoft's Office Standard Gets Green Light
- Enterprise Windows IT: Massachusetts Reconsiders Microsoft Office