Well on the way to harmonization – Office Open XML becomes the second ISO document standard

02.04.2008

Experts at the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS eGovernment Lab welcome the decision of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to approve the document standard Office Open XML (Ecma 376) alongside ODF 1.0 (ISO/IEC 26300) as an accredited International Standard. Once voting had taken place in the national technical committees and the voting process was duly monitored, as the ISO/IEC press release dated 1 April 2008 states, on the international level a majority vote of 75 percent came out in favor of approval of Office Open XML (OOXML). This decision represents a major step towards driving forward the interopera­bility of the two formats – both of which are based on XML-on the ISO level.