The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO (yeah, I can't figure out that acronym either), posted a press release on their web site Tuesday  announcing that ISO/IES DIS 29500, or Office Open XML, received well more than the minimum number of votes by the international community to become an official ISO standard. While ISO has not officially approved Open XML as an international standard, it received 86% approval, well above the 66.6% needed for approval.

Open XML may very well be one of the most significant recent technical standards that you haven't heard much about. For a starter course with links out to important resources, check out this post I did a couple of weeks ago on this very subject.

The official Microsoft statement on the ratification comes from Tom Robertson, General Manager of Interoperability and Standards:

With 86 percent of voting national bodies supporting ratification, there is overwhelming support for Open XML. This outcome is a clear win for customers, technology providers and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs and have a voice in the evolution of this widely adopted standard. The input from the technical experts, customers and governments around the world has greatly improved the Open XML specification and will make it even more useful to developers and customers. Once it is formally approved, we are committed to supporting this specification in our products, and we will continue to work with standards bodies, governments and the industry to promote greater interoperability and innovation.

Open XML has been an open standard for years. In fact, a slew of software vendors already support it their products. These products include Microsoft Office (2007, 2003, XP, 2000), OpenOffice Novel Edition, Gnumeric, Neo-Office 2.1, WordPerfect 2007 and the PalmOS.

This ratification is important to developers and architects worldwide. The standardization of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents will:

1. Provides customers with much more choice -- they can make software purchasing solutions based not on existing file formats, but which office productivity software has the best features for the best price.
2. Allow developers can create applications on the desktop, the server and mobile devices that generate documents that they know, with confidence, will be readily consumed by their information workers' software.

In very much the same way we look to standards-based technologies like web services to allow us to interoperate between systems built to run on different platforms, developers and architects must begin to think the same way about business documents. Adoption of Open XML allows technology providers to focus on building the best software solution possible without having to worry about the formatting minutia of multiple different consuming applications.

And how can that be a bad thing?