Ecma International approves Microsoft’s Office 2007 file formats

Ecma International approves Microsoft’s Office 2007 file formats

Ecma International has said that they are approving the new file formats introduced in the latest version of MS Office 2007 suite.

These formats are broadly called Open XML and the approval faced criticism from US based tech giant IBM.

Ecma’s General Assembly has also agreed to submit the standard for adoption by the International Organization for Standardization.

Ecma said in a statement that standardizing this format would aid interoperability between Office and other competing software available in the market.

Jan van den Beld, secretary general of Ecma International added: “The broad spectrum of sponsors from the industry and public institutions ensure the creation of an open standard that can create a wide range of possibilities for document processing, archival and interoperability.”

Bob Sutor, vice president for open source and standards for IBM spoke about this on his blog post: “It (OpenDocument) is an example of a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past. We voted for the future.”