Alex Brown, the convenor of the ISO's Office Open XML (OOXML) Ballot Resolution Meeting, has accused Microsoft of failure in its efforts to transform the document format into a genuinely open standard

ISO conducted a Ballot Resolution Meeting on Friday in an effort to address some of the technical issues that plague Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.

After the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) failed to resolve the differences around Microsoft's proposed OOXML standard, what happens next?

In what may be a perceived threat to the objectivity of the Office Open XML standards process, Standards Australia will include a Microsoft developer and consultant as part of its delegation for this month's Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva.

The XML document (Extensible Markup Language) format war, waged between IT giants IBM and Microsoft and their supporters, is expected to reach a conclusion next month with a crucial ballot by members of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

While all the drama is unfolding before the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February and the subsequent 30 day period while countries can still change their vote, I thought I would point out something that I assume is fairly obvious to most people: Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably
about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with
long term interoperability.

We’ve heard from folks that the final post-Ballot Resolution Meeting version of OOXML has still not been made available to national standards bodies. This would be the updated 6000+ page document that included all the edits voted on at the BRM. With such a document one could actually, for example, check correctness of the edits and ensure that changes were actually inserted.

Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce to push the American National Standards Institute to ignore the votes of its advisory committees and vote "yes" on ISO standardizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the one in competition with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) pushed by IBM and Sun.

Norbert Bollow, founder of OpenISO.org, has just released the OpenISO.org Call For Participation for creating a "problem report" document about OOXML, that can help ISO/IEC national member bodies with evaluating whether the changes that will be decided at the OOXML "Ballot Resolution Meeting" (BRM) in February are sufficient to address OOXML's most serious problems.