Office Open XML Document Format submitted to Ecma as a potential standard
What a co-incidence... one minute I'm talking about the importance of digital preservation and the very next day there's an announcement as big as this :-)
The British Library is one of the few key partners in this submission along with the likes of Barclays Capital and the e-Gov unit (all of which I've had the pleasure of working with over the last year). Given the billions of documents that have been created using Office and how many will be created in the future, this is a huge step for Microsoft and for the industry as a whole. Huge credit must go to the likes of Jean Paoli (co-creator of XML 1.0) et al who have been pushing all the way. He answers some Q&A here.
Sometimes you have to take a step back to really understand how big some announcements are - believe me, this one really is a whopper! Wow!
