The ISO has taken over control of the OOXML specification and started a committee to consider harmonisation with the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
Wednesday was the last day that all resolutions to the new standard, called ISO/IEC 29500, were accepted, according to Brian Jones, a program manager for office at Microsoft who has been involved in the standardisation process.
Last week, the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) announced that Office Open XML (OOXML) gained enough votes to pass as a standard.
Alex Brown, a member of the UK's national standards body who led the Ballot Resolution Meeting in February, laid out what happens next now that Open XML is a standard in his blog.
Three committees have been formed to usher development of the standard going forward, two of which deal with handling Open XML.
The third is dealing specifically with interoperability between Open XML and ODF.
The most extreme voices in this debate are unhappy about Open XML's standardisation.
But people dealing with exchanging documents and writing document-oriented software should take note that interoperability is now part of the ISO's digital documents charter. How that work will interact with other ongoing projects is unclear, but it is now being addressed at the level of national standards bodies.
"The DIN Delegate [DIN is the German national standards body] presented an update on the work that they have been doing around translation between the Open XML formats and ODF. I've discussed this a number of times before as being a key piece of the harmonisation work," according to Jones.
Meanwhile, the protested Norway vote did not go down without a demonstration.
On Wednesday, sympathisers of the Norwegian committee that was essentially overruled by Norway's standards body to vote yes on the Open XML ballads staged a protest.
