The company, which dominates the market for desktop productivity software, plans to provide the technical specifications of Office 12 file formats to ECMA early next month. The technical committee is also being sponsored by Intel, Apple Computer, NextPage and some European customers, including British Petroleum and the British Library.
The creation of a fully documented standard submission derived from the formats, called Microsoft Office Open XML, will likely take about a year, Microsoft executives said. Once Microsoft Office Open XML is recognised as an ECMA standard, the group of companies then intends to pursue standardisation at ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, which is particularly influential among government customers.
"Moving to standard as an open standard will place a level of trust on the technology that will give people the confidence to get behind it," said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy. "We look forward to the day when people look at this as a milestone, as the beginning of the end for closed documents."
ECMA is a Geneva-based standards organisation which issues standards and recommendations. Microsoft has submitted other software to ECMA for standardisation, including programming languages ECMAScript and C#.
As part of its standardisation effort, Microsoft will change the license in order to remove "virtually all the barriers" for developers working with the file formats.
Microsoft has already made the specifications for the XML document formats in Office 2003 available on a royalty-free basis. Office 12, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2006, will save documents by default in the Open XML format.
Many customers, notably government agencies with long-term record archiving needs, have pressured Microsoft to make its document formats available on favorable terms. With access to these technical specifications, customers are assured that documents can be read by many different products, according to Microsoft.
The British Library on Monday lauded Microsoft's move.
"It's an important step forward for digital preservation and will help us fulfill the British Library's core responsibility of making our digital collections accessible for generations to come," Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library, said in a statement.
Dueling office format standards
Despite Microsoft's active embrace of XML-based file formats and
work with government customers, the commonwealth of
Massachusetts--in a high-profile and contested case--decided to
adopt an XML-based format called OpenDocument, or ODF. The
decision was driven in large part because OpenDocument is
developed by a multiparty standards organisation, rather than a
single company, according to state officials.
Some of Microsoft's foes have rallied behind OpenDocument, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, Novell, Adobe Systems and Google. Microsoft plans to accommodate OpenDocument formats in Office 12 through third-party products rather than native file format support.
Microsoft's Yates said that OpenDocument and Microsoft's Open XML formats both address productivity applications but have some differences. He said his company's formats are designed to be thoroughly compatible with all existing Office formats and to integrate XML-formatted data from other applications.
Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady said, based on Microsoft's previous ECMA standardisation efforts, it's not clear that Microsoft will relinquish control of the Office formats to other companies.
He noted that Microsoft submitted its C# and Common Language Runtime software to ECM, and both are used by the open-source project Mono. But Mono "is eyed warily by Microsoft," he said.
"It's interesting that Microsoft would feel compelled to make this move but at the end of the day, it's still a format controlled by a single commercial entity," O'Grady said.
With MS, the devil is always in the detail. The chances of them ever bringing out an unencumbered file format is probably just about zero. There is is simply too much to lose from just being 'another competitor'. The clues are there, eg the caveat about removing "virtually all the barriers." My bet is that is that like the European networking protocols, they will be 'open' to the extent of not allowing open source applications to be included.