Thumbs up! After a lot of turmoil the ECMA Office Open XML document format has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard - IS 29500. The news came out a day earlier than stated, due to a leak which made ISO to go public with the news.

The process has not been easy for any part in the process and it has for sure made footprints in the standardization history. A lot of lobbying money as been spent (Politics matter) and a lot of committed people has engaged in verbal and written battles.

Now it is time to look forward, once again. Microsoft has to make sure that their Office suite adopts to the IS 29500 specification (once it published and in print), the anti-OOXML campaigners has an obligation to help out in the ISO-process to make IS 29500 even better and to make OOXML, ODF and other formats interoperable.

My only fears is that some greedy lawyers are trying to make some (more) money from this by suing national-bodies or even ISO itself or trying to delay it all by throwing more monkey wrenches in the process.

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