More on Doug's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/04/17/is29500-is-an-american-national-standard.aspx -Brian

There was some great news yesterday for those of you waiting to see what the final version of the Open XML specification would look like after the BRM resolutions were applied. ISO/IEC 29500 is now published in its final form: http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1181 As I mentioned in...

I'm heading home from Norway in the morning, but wanted to give a quick update on the progress made over the past few days. I was attending the SC34 meetings in Oslo and there was a good amount of focus on document format standards (SC34, as designated by JTC1, is the maintenance body for Open XML)....

I'm sure many folks have seen the news by now that Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard (IS 29500). Based on the numbers I've seen, looking at the P member countries there are now 24 who vote "yes", and only 8 vote "no". This puts the P member approval at 75% easily passing the 2/3 majority...

Norway has also decided to change their vote to "yes" for DIS 29500 (Open XML). http://www.standard.no/imaker.exe?id=18594 Norway had initially voted "no with comments" in September, so it's great to see that they now feel Open XML is ready to be an ISO standard. [ Update 4/1/08 : Standards Norway...

Oliver Bell just informed me that South Korea has decided to vote for approval of DIS 29500 (Open XML) as an ISO standard. This is a change from their original "no with comments" posisiton they took back in September, and is great news. South Korea was definitely influential in some of the bigger decisions...

Jesper Lund Stocholm is reporting that Denmark has decided to change their initial vote of "no" in September to "yes" for ISO approval of DIS 29500 (Open XML). Here is a pointer to the press release: http://www.ds.dk/4225 As Stephen McGibbon put it: "Denmark is a ISO/IEC JTC1 P member and has changed...

Here's the official statement, although it's in Finnish: http://www.sfs.fi/ajankohtaista/tiedotteet/20080327195555.html Finland had initially voted "abstain" back in September, but they have now decided to change their vote to "yes" in support of DIS 29500 (Open XML) as an ISO standard. -Brian

Oliver has a post today discussing this, as it's come up a lot in the discussions he's been having: http://osrin.net/2008/03/27/the-osp-will-apply-to-future-versions-of-dis29500/ -Brian

If you want to get an idea of how the add-in works, Pablo has posted a short video: Pablo suggested skipping to about 4:40 into the video to see the actual solution. For more information on the add-in, check out the blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/exscientia/archive/2008/03/25/short-video-clip-on-the...

www.hp.com/go/officedocumentstandards "In the current vote on OOXML at JTC 1, HP is supporting an affirmative vote in those national standards bodies in which HP is active." -Brian

I just saw this on Stephen McGibbon's website: http://notes2self.net/archive/2008/03/25/czech-republic-votes-to-approve-dis29500.aspx The Czech Republic has decided to change their vote to "yes" for DIS 29500. The Czech national body (led by Jirka Kosek ) played an important role in the technical...

I try to keep the discussion on this blog primarily focused on the area I care most about, the technology behind Open XML. Every so often I've mentioned ODF, especially when discussing the translation and harmonization updates, but in terms of discussing the format itself I've assumed that other folks...

Via Stephen McGibbon: http://notes2self.net/archive/2008/03/24/durusau-quot-opendocument-among-others-will-lose-if-openxml-loses-quot.aspx " Patrick Durusau has posted another thoughtful contribution to the document formats standardisation debate" -Brian

We're a couple weeks away from the final decision on whether DIS 29500 will become IS 29500 and if ISO will take on the stewardship of the Open XML formats. We already had a good preview of the type of work we can achieve within the SC34 group over the past 14 months. Those same sorts of improvements...

BRM Summary I wanted to take the time to give a narrative of what actually happened in the BRM, since we're now moving onto the final phase and I wanted to get this all in writing before I forgot. I wanted to give an overview of the topics discussed based on the documents that were published last...

Gray looks into some of the recent thoughts from Patrick Durusau: http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2008/03/12/within-minutes.aspx Accessibility update from Reed, and some news on the activities so far at CSUN: http://blogs.technet.com/reedblog/archive/2008/03/10/microsoft-at-csun.aspx...

There were some concerns raised earlier on that the Open XML format required a specific object embedding to be used (OLE). While it's true that the tag names in the format have "OLE" in them, the embedding is actually generic, and can use other technologies if that's what's desired. I believe (but I...

Doug Mahugh just posted about a call this afternoon where the U.S. V1 technical committee reviewed the results of last week’s BRM and has voted to approve DIS 29500: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/03/07/us-v1-technical-committee-votes-to-recommend-approval-of-dis-29500.aspx I just got...

Patrick Durusau, the editor for ODF 1.0 and 1.2, as well as the chair of INCITS V1, has a new post where he talks about his change of opinion. He is now in support of the ISO approval of DIS 29500 (Open XML). http://www.durusau.net/publications/onbeingheard.pdf I'm hoping that Patrick will also help...

Here's a bit more information on the results of the BRM last week, and where we go from here. There were about 1,000 comments/issues raised last year with the spec, and starting last fall Ecma began posting responses and proposed changes to the specification to address the concerns. The final batch of...

As promised last month , the binary documentation (.doc, .xls, .ppt) is now live. In addition to this, the project to create an open source translator (binary -> Open XML) has now been formed on sourceforge, and the development roadmap has been published. Read my earlier post for more background on...

I know Rob Weir has been traveling a lot these days lobbying against Open XML across the world, so when I saw this post yesterday I assumed it must be jetlag. I think he completely misunderstood some of the responses from Ecma related to the issue of harmonization, and has missed some significant developments...

There have been some discussions over the past several years about the harmonization of Open XML with ODF. In reality the world of formats is clearly much broader than just ODF and Open XML, but given the political climate the focus lately has been specifically on those two formats. As most folks know...

A few interesting links I wanted to point out: Content Reuse with Open XML and XSLT – Alexander Falk (Altova's CEO) has a great post giving examples of how to work with Open XML files using XML Spy: "This is the first article in a series of blog postings that I plan to write about practical Open...