Microsoft Open XML approved as standard fuelling market debate

Stan Beer
Friday, 08 December 2006 06:07

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft has set itself to do battle with rival IT vendors and the open source community by taking the first steps to have its Open XML format ratified as an international standard. Open XML, the default document format of Office 2007, will compete directly with the open source favored OpenDocument Format (ODF). The move has been applauded by some and criticised by others.

While Open XML will be accepted as a standard by European based standards body Ecma International, Microsoft is still many months away from gaining the ISO certification it really wants from the International Standards Organization.

The Government of Massachusetts set the cat among the pigeons in 2005 when it mandated that all of its documents had to conform to the ODF standard. The former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, responsible for the decision, Peter Quinn, said calculations his team did for upgrading office software for 50,000 desktops showed that Microsoft Office 2007 would cost four times the price of an Open Office solution.

“We did a back of the envelope sketch for implementing Open Documents versus Office 12 (Office 2007),” Quinn told iTWire at LinuxWorld earlier this year. Quinn was basing his calculations on using the free open source OpenOffice.org suite, which supports ODF.

Microsoft was reportedly invited to join the consortium pushing the ODF standard, which includes IBM, Novel and Sun Microsystems, but declined, instead pushing ahead with its own Open XML, which Microsoft wants to make the open document standard of choice. ODF has ISO approval and Microsoft could be as much as one year away from obtaining it for Open XML.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has born the brunt of much criticism from pro-Microsoft lobbyists of its support for ODF and Quinn was arguably forced to resign over the issue, but to date the Massachusetts has held firm in its decision.

Linux vendor Novell, which supports ODF, caused a stir this week when it announced support for Open XML. Apple, which runs Office 2007, is the only other major vendor to back Microsoft's effort to make Open XML a standard.

The move by Novell, which has recently formed an interoperability alliance with Microsoft, has caused open source advocates to cry foul, with some accusing Novell of trying to fork the OpenOffice suite. Novell, however, has sort to counter this criticism by making the Open XML documents conversion in its version of OpenOffice available to the entire OpenOffice community, including OpenOffice.org.

Novell claims that allowing OpenOffice to save documents in Open XML format will serve to increase interoperability. However, critics say that having two competing standards in the marketplace will merely create confusion in the user community.

The success that Microsoft has in convincing business and government to adopt Office 2007 will be a key determinant in whether Open XML becomes a widely adopted standard in preference to ODF. Office 2007 is a more advanced product than OpenOffice.org 2.0 but less than 5% of users regularly used the advanced features of its predecessor Office 2003. There is also a level of disgruntlement in the community over the need for users existing Office versions to download conversion software in order to read Office 2007 documents saved in Open XML.