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After more than a year's work by ECMA International and the involvement of the likes of Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress, the Office Open XML formats are now deemed 'interoperable by design' and offering developers enough technical details to ensure 'predictable results and high fidelity interoperability'.

Standardisation by ECMA gives Microsoft a fast track route to getting Office Open XML approved by the ISO organisation. ECMA will continue its involvement with the standard, making sure it remains backwards compatible, maintaining its current feature set, and enhancing it where appropriate.

Novell has already introduced a version of OpenOffice with support for the new formats. Corel has also showed its support in a format-friendly update to WordPerfect.

'The broad spectrum of sponsors from the industry and public institutions ensure the creation of an open standard

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that can create a wide range of possibilities for document processing, archival and interoperability,' said Jan van den Beld, Secretary General of Ecma International. 'The Open XML standard recognizes the benefit of backward compatibility preservation of the billions of documents that have already been created while enabling new future applications of document technology.'

'Today's Ecma vote is a major milestone in furthering document interoperability - we believe customers will really appreciate the benefits that Open XML provides,' said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft. 'We look forward to continuing to work with Ecma and the other contributors, extending our collaboration across the industry as part of the ISO certification process.'

The Office Open XML format falls under Microsoft's patent covenant not to assert any of its patents over the use of the file formats.

However, it hasn't been plain sailing for Microsoft with this new standard. It faces competition in the form of the Open Document Format, which has much support from the open-source industry.

Yet it is important for Microsoft to get this right. Governments are increasingly aware of the issue of proprietary formats and obselescence, where civil documents may not be accessible to those without a paid-up copy of the software able to read them, or worse, where the proprietary format has not been maintained and become obselete.

Software companies not able to show that their office software formats are susceptible to these issues will have a hard time selling into the sector - a sector that traditionally has been a Microsoft shop.