The other day we mentioned South Africa because of its decision to embrace OpenDocument format. Shortly afterwards we spotted Microsoft’s plan to pay a little visit to this country. Coincidence? Maybe.

A reader has just sent us a little valuable headsup about the recently-reported news of South Africa adopting ODF.

Sieging with kindness: South Africa's continued 'gift showers' amid plans to embrace FOSS.

Andy Updegrove has the news that South Africa has filed an official appeal, protesting the approval of OOXML, and their action means that OOXML is now in limbo until the appeal ends:SABS, the National Body member of ISO/IEC JTC1 for South Africa, has filed a formal appeal with both ISO and IEC, challenging the Fast Track adoption of OOXML.

South Africa has filed an official appeal against the ISO's fast-track decision to approve Microsoft's OOXML format as an international standard.

Following recent reports of a South African bank eyeing out Linux, Novell South Africa today issued a statement in which it said it had reached an agreement with First National Bank of South Africa to standardise the bank's 12 000 desktops in its 680 retail branches on Novell's Linux product.

Microsoft's plans of having its OOXML document format accepted as a national standard were thwarted by the South African Bureau of Standards in a conclusive vote against the move in a meeting yesterday.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO.

I attended last week’s ODF Workshop in South Africa, and I really enjoyed the event. It was an excellent opportunity to meet people who work with ODF in governments around the world, exchange experiences on migration, talk about the new features on ODF 1.2 and talk a lot about other things that I really appreciate as interoperability and open standards adoption worldwide.