Microsoft have announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind billions of documents to customers and the industry as an international standard.
Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba will co-sponsor a submission to Ecma International, the standards organization, of the Microsoft Office Open XML document format technology. Furthermore, Microsoft will make available tools to enable old documents to capitalize on the open standard format.
With Office document formats available as an open standard, customers will have even more confidence in their ability to store and manage data for the long term, with many more vendors and tools from which they can choose. The move will benefit the broader software ecosystem because software and services vendors worldwide will be able to more easily build compelling solutions that interoperate across a broad spectrum of technologies.
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