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What this means is that future changes to the proposed standard have to be agreed with and through the standards body, via a members-based technical committee and not at the whim of the company. The move is clearly a means for Microsoft to try and reassure the wider world that the move to an XML-based document system will indeed be open and not subject to Microsoft-inspired 'extensions'.

Particularly, Redmond has been under attack from proponents of an Open Document Format, such as the state of Massachusetts, which plans to adopt the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) open file format as a prerequisite for new productivity suites from 2007. The OpenDocument XML format is also the basis for the open source OpenOffice suite, now at version 2.0.

Microsoft was long accused, for example, of 'embracing and extending', the cross-platform Java technology. Also, Microsoft Office file formats have not always been compatible between different versions of the productivity suite.

The company says it will also make tools available for old Office documents to work with the new standard format. Office 12 itself is scheduled to appear in the autumn of 2006 and has just gone into its first technical beta.

'We are committed to open standards

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such as XML to provide the highest levels of interoperability between legacy and next-generation software,' said Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International. 'The creation of an XML file format standard is a major industry milestone. We hope this will provide both users and organizations with the peace of mind that they will be able to access their past and future documents for generations to come.'

Back in June Microsoft announced that XML would underpin the native document formats of the next Office suite - Microsoft anoints XML as Office 12 format. As well as introducing an XML format for PowerPoint, Microsoft was promising 'significantly enhanced XML formats' for Word and Excel. It will, Redmond claims, help improve file and data management, data recovery, and interoperability with external business systems.

Among those co-sponsoring the standards submission are Intel, Toshiba, the British Library and Apple.

'Apple is pleased to support an Ecma standard for Microsoft Office Open XML document formats, which will make them more open and widely available to all,' said Philip Schiller, senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple. 'Apple and Microsoft will continue to work closely together to deliver great products to Mac users and application developers for many years to come.'

Microsoft has been down this Ecma route before. In December of 2001 - Microsoft standardises .NET - the standards body ratified both the .Net framework and the C++-like programming language, C#. The most notable effect of this move, apart from giving the language more credence among the development community, was that it also enabled the open-source movement to better shadow the .Net framework for projects such as Mono, from Novell, and dotGNU, from GNU.

Microsoft demonstrated some of the new features of the next Office suite at the recent IT Forum keynote.