Standardization of Office Open XML

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Microsoft's Office Open XML is currently Ecma International standard 376, approved on 7 December 2006. Ecma International submitted the specification to ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1. Controversially, it is currently undergoing fast-track standardization as DIS 29500 (Draft International Standard 29500).^[1]

In a round of voting by ISO/IEC national body members in September 2007, the draft text was not approved. A ballot resolution process has amended the text.^[2] On 2 April 2008, ISO announced that the Office Open XML format has reached the necessary votes to be approved for acceptance as an ISO/SEC International Standard.^[3] As a result, Office Open XML may become an ISO/IEC international standard (ISO/IEC 29500) later this year. There are presently appeals against the standardisation from the national standards bodies of South Africa, Brazil, India and Venezuela, and the standard will not be published until these appeals are resolved.

There have been allegations that the ISO ballot process for OOXML was marred with voting irregularities and heavy-handed tactics by some stakeholders.^[4][5]

Contents 1 Standardization within Ecma International 2 Submission to ISO and IEC 2.1 Ballot result 2.2 Response to the ballot 2.3 Ballot resolution process 2.4 Final outcome 2.5 Appeals 2.6 Examination of fast track process 3 Maintenance regime 4 Complaints about the national bodies process 4.1 Investigation of Microsoft by the European Commission 5 Microsoft complaints about competitors 6 Arguments in support and criticism of Office Open XML standard 6.1 Support 6.1.1 User base argument 6.1.2 Microsoft key benefits arguments 6.1.3 Policy arguments 6.1.4 Technical arguments 6.2 Criticism 6.2.1 Sources of opposition 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Standardization within Ecma International

More than a year after being asked by the European Union to standardize their Office 2003 XML formats^{[citation needed]}, Microsoft submitted the Office Open XML to the Ecma International standardization process to make it an open standard. Ecma formed a technical committee (TC45) in order to produce and maintain a "formal standard for office productivity applications that is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats, submitted by Microsoft".^[6] The technical committee is chaired by Microsoft^[7] and includes members from Apple, Canon, Intel, NextPage, Novell, Pioneer, Statoil ASA, Toshiba, The United States Library of Congress, The British Library and the Gnome Foundation.^[8]

Ecma International approved Office Open XML as an Ecma standard (Ecma-376) on 7 December 2006^[9] and submitted the approved submission for fasttracking standardization to ISO/IEC JTC 1.

The Office Open XML File Formats standard, Ecma-376, can be freely downloaded from Ecma international.^[10]

[edit] Submission to ISO and IEC

As an ISO/IEC JTC 1 external Category A liaison, Ecma has submitted Ecma 376 to the JTC 1 fast track standardization process. To meet the requirements of this process,^[11] Ecma has submitted the documents "Explanatory report on Office Open XML Standard (Ecma-376) submitted to JTC 1 for fast-track"^[12] and "Licensing conditions that Microsoft offers for Office Open XML".^[13] ISO and IEC classified the specification as DIS 29500 Information technology – Office Open XML file formats.^[14]

The fast track process consists of a contradictions phase, a ballot phase, and a ballot resolution phase.

During the contradictions phase, ISO and IEC members submitted perceived contradictions to JTC 1. During the ballot phase the members voted on the specification as it was submitted by Ecma and submitted editorial and technical comments with their vote. In the ballot resolution phase the submitted comments were addressed and members invited to reconsider their vote.

[edit] Ballot result

Main article: Office Open XML Ballot Results

ISO announced in September 2007 that the submitted draft of Office Open XML had not achieved the required number of votes for approval during the ballot phase.^[15] Eighty-seven ISO and IEC member countries responded to the ballot. There were 51 votes of "approval", 18 votes of "disapproval" and 18 abstentions. "P-members", who were required to vote, had to approve by 66.67% for the text to be approved. The P-members voted 17 in favor out of 32, below the required threshold for approval. Also, no more than 25% of the total member votes may be negative for the text to be approved, and this requirement was also not met since 26% of the total votes were negative. The standardization process then entered its ballot resolution phase, described below.

[edit] Response to the ballot

Ecma produced a draft "Disposition of comments" that addresses the 1,027 distinct "NB comments" (that is, comments by national bodies,) submitted in the letter ballot phase, consisting of some 1,600 pages of commentary and proposed changes. The ISO/IEC members had 6 weeks to review this draft, and had an opportunity to participate in several informal conference call sessions with the Ecma TC to discuss it before the BRM.^[16]

[edit] Ballot resolution process

A Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) is an integral part of the ballot resolution phase. The outcome of, and period following, this meeting decides whether DIS 29500 succeeds or fails in its bid to become an International Standard. The DIS 29500 BRM took place in late February 2008.

[edit] Final outcome

At the BRM, 873 proposed changes to the specification were submitted by Ecma (of their 1,027 responses, 154 proposed no change). Of these only 20% were discussed and modified in meeting sessions, given the 5 day time limit of the meeting. The remaining 80% were not discussed and were subject to a voting mechanism approved by the meeting (see Resolution 37 of the meeting resolutions cited below). Using this voting mechanism NBs could approve, disapprove or abstain on each and every one of these proposed changes. This allowed a set of approved changes to be decided upon without discussion.^[17]

With the original submitted draft used as the base, all the agreed upon changes are applied by the Project Editor to create a new document incorporating the changes mandated by the BRM. In parallel with this, NBs have 30 days after the BRM in which to decide whether to amend their votes of 2 September 2007. At the end of March 2008, the ISO voting criteria had been met^[18], meaning the new text would be passed for publication as an ISO/IEC standard (JTC 1 Directives^[11] clause 13.9) subject to appeals being resolved.

[edit] Appeals

Four ISO member bodies filed appeals: the South African Bureau of Standards^{[19] [20]}, the Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (Brazilian Technical Standards Organization) and the Bureau of Indian Standards^[21]. This is the first ever case of an appeal after a BRM process under ISO/IEC JTC1 although appeals occur regularly in other technical committees ^[21] in May 2008 and Fondo para la Normalización y Certificación de la Calidad (Venezuela)^[22] in June 2008. The standard will not be published until these appeals are resolved.

The main issue in the appeals is the BRM procedures. The 3 appealing countries did not appeal during the BRM and even all voted approval on the resolution that allowed for voting on each of the resolutions that had not been discussed in the plenary meeting through means of a form. ^[23]. The three countries appealing used that form vote for a disapproval vote of most of the responses (in total only 4 countries did that) but failed to have a significant number of responses disapproved.

The CEOs of ISO and IEC each have one month to examine the appeals and to try to reach a compromise with the national standards bodies. If that fails, the appeals are passed to the Standards Management Board at IEC and the Technical Management Board (TMB) at ISO for resolution.

When the appeals are resolved the text goes into the publication process which takes several months. It may take additional time for ISO/IEC to make the standard a free publication, if it becomes one.

A further letter of protest was filed by Open Source Leverandørforeningen, a Danish open source vendor association, which will be acted upon in Geneva,^[24] although no appeal has been filed directly by Dansk Standard itself.

[edit] Examination of fast track process

Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN, Germany) voted "yes" on DIS 29500, but considers the fast track process will need amendment for standards of this size in the light of how the standardisation of OOXML proceeded.^[25]

[edit] Maintenance regime

The precise details of a maintenance regime for Office Open XML (should it become an ISO/IEC Standard) are yet to be determined. Ecma has put forward a maintenance proposal,^[26] but JTC 1 has named SC 34 as the designated maintenance body for the Standard (should it be approved).^{[citation needed]}

Whatever maintenance regime is decided, the JTC 1 Directives stipulate that:

• Proposals to amend the text, and acceptance of any such amendments, are subject to normal JTC 1 voting processes (JTC 1 Directives^[11] clause 15.5)
• The standard cannot be "stabilised" (no longer subject to periodic maintenance) except through approval in a JTC 1 ballot (JTC 1 Directives,^[11] clause 15.6.2).
• For the standard to be stabilised it must have passed through one review cycle (JTC 1 Directives,^[11] clause 15.6.1). In this review cycle the text would have to have been re-written to comply with ISO's formatting and verbal requirements (JTC 1 Directives,^[11] clause 13.4).

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 has decided to use two ad hoc working groups for maintenance of ISO/IEC 29500:^[27] a short term workgroup to collect comments on the newly approved standard and a long term maintenance workgroup that will be in full control of the maintenance work on ISO/IEC 29500. Ecma will be invited as a liaison to provide expertise on maintenance of the standard.

[edit] Complaints about the national bodies process

Complaints about the procedures in the national bodies have surfaced during the five-month ballot process.

• An article on Ars Technica sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."^[28]
• In Sweden, Microsoft notified the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) that an employee sent a memo to two of its partners, requesting them to join the SIS committee and vote in favor of Office Open XML in return for "marketing contributions."^[29] Jason Matusow, a Director in the Corporate Standards Strategy Team at Microsoft, stated that the memo was the action of an individual employee acting outside company policy, and that the memo was retracted as soon as it was discovered.^[30] SIS have since changed their voting procedure so that you have to actually perticipate before you are allowed to vote.^[31]
• Sweden invalidated its vote (80% was for approval) as one company cast more than one vote, which is against SIS policy.^[32]
• In Switzerland, SNV registered a vote of "approval with comments," and there was some criticism about a "conflict of interest" regarding the chairman of the UK 14 sub-committee, who did not allow discussion of licensing, economic and political arguments.^[33][34] In addition, the chairman of the relevant SNV parent committee is also the secretary general of Ecma International, which approved OOXML as a standard. Further complaints regarded "committee stuffing", which is however allowed by present SNV rules, and non-adherence to SNV rules by the UK 14 chairman, which resulted in a re-vote with the same result.
• In India, Open Source Initiative board member Raj Mathur charges that Microsoft supplied a form letter to several non-profit organizations to "bombard the Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the Bureau of Indian Standards with letters supporting its OOXML proposal."^[35]
• Australia's peak standards body, Standards Australia, was criticized for its handling of the OOXML process by industry figures, including the New Zealand Open Source Society, open source advisory firm Waugh Partners, Australian National University Professor Roger Clarke, standards expert Andrew Updegrove, IBM and Google. Standards Australia sent ISO SC34 member and XML and Schematron specialist Rick Jelliffe to the ISO vote, despite critics alleging that Jelliffe is not independent of Microsoft. Jelliffe was paid by Microsoft to create Relax NG schemas for OOXML through Ecma certification, and had previously been in the news after being paid by Microsoft to improve incorrect Wikipedia articles about Office Open XML. Late in the process, Standards Australia broke a previous public pledge to send two internal employees to the ISO.^[36][37]
• Norway's vote was decided by Standard Norge, the mostly opposing viewpoints of the technical committee were ignored after they were unable to reach consensus. Membership in the technical committee had risen from 6-7 to 30 members; all of the pre-OOXML members argued in favour of a "no" vote. ^{[38][39][40][41]}
• The European Commission's IDABC program runs the "Open Source Observatory" which is "dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software."^[42] Via its "Open Source News", it has criticized the standardization process.
  • It states that in Germany, two opponents of Office Open XML, Deutsche Telekom and Google, were not allowed to vote^[43] because they tried to join the committee last-minute.^[44] Open Source News says, "Participants described the process as ludicrous."
  • It alleges that in the Netherlands, "the chair of the national standardization committee deciding on OOXML, protested that the almost unanimous conditional approval was blocked by Microsoft."^[43]
  • It states that Poland's technical committee KT 171 rejected Office Open XML.^[45] The vote was invalidated and assigned to KT 182. A member of Poland's Linux community believes this was due to "reorganisation in the Polish standardisation body." KT 182 voted to approve Office Open XML.^[46]
  • It alleges that in Spain, Microsoft submitted misinformation to the Spanish standardization committee suggesting that the autonomous region of Andalucía supported the company's Office Open XML-proposal.^[47]
  • It states that in Portugal, eleven companies (including OpenDocument supporter IBM) and open source advocacy groups requested that Portugal's ministry of Economy and Innovation investigate Portugal's vote on Office Open XML.^[48]

After the specification was officially accepted as an ISO standard, OpenDocument supporters Red Hat, Ubuntu, and IBM claimed the ISO is losing credibility. ^[49][50] Ubuntu even went so far as to claim that it would not implement OOXML. IBM reiterated its support for ODF.

• In June 2008, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom rejected a complaint by the UK Unix and Open Systems User Group, requesting a review of the British Standard Institution's decision to vote in favour of DIS 29500. The judge commented that "this application does not disclose any arguable breach of the procedures of BSI or of rules of procedural fairness".^[51]

[edit] Investigation of Microsoft by the European Commission

The European Commission has started an antitrust investigation into the interoperability of the Office Open XML format on the request of European Committee for Interoperable Systems, "a coalition of Microsoft's largest competitors".^[52][53][54] Anonymous source(s) of the Wall Street Journal claim that this investigation also includes an investigation into the ISO/SEC standardization process.^[55] The Financial Times reports that several national organizations in Europe have confirmed receipt of a letter by the European Commission. The letters ask for views on these charges and any supporting details of "alleged irregularities in several countries over the OOXML standardization proposal, and accusations of attempts to influence voting."^[56]

[edit] Microsoft complaints about competitors

In an open letter, Microsoft attacked IBM's opposition to the Office Open XML standardization process, saying

"On December 7th, Ecma approved the adoption of Open XML as an international open standard. The vote was nearly unanimous; of the 21 members, IBM’s was the sole dissenting vote. IBM again was the lone dissenter when Ecma also agreed to submit Open XML as a standard for ratification by ISO/IEC JTC1."^[57]

Nicos Tsilas, Microsoft's senior director of interoperability and intellectual property policy, expressed concern that IBM and the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the use of the rival OpenDocument format (ODF) to the exclusion of other formats. In his opinion, they are "using government intervention as a way to compete" as they "couldn't compete technically."^[58]

"IBM led a global campaign urging national bodies to... not even consider Open XML, because ODF had made it through ISO/IEC JTC1 first."

"IBM have asked governments to have an open-source, exclusive purchasing policy."

But another ZDNet story quotes Tsilas questioning why these accusations are coming forth.^[59] The slip of the tongue by Tsilas of open source instead of open standards. Office Open XML is not open source but open standards. "There are good arguments for and against mandating open source in government — protecting business models or profit streams should not be among them" and that Office Open XML is supposed to be an open standard like ODF, "How, then, can adopting the latter "harm Microsoft's profit stream"? And since when has an open standard been "a product"?"

[edit] Arguments in support and criticism of Office Open XML standard

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.(February 2008) Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

[edit] Support

Microsoft has argued for standardization on the Open XML community web site.^[60] The Microsoft arguments for Office Open XML include that it is designed to cover most kinds of document data, so that old documents can be converted to Office Open XML with little data loss; that the format is compact, since it is compressed; that it is easy to learn; and that it inherits a lot of benefits from XML, such as document data integration, Unicode, and easy integration of new formats.

To counter this argument, ODF Alliance India published an extensive technical report in 2007 containing concrete issues by members of the association, as well as replies from Microsoft.^[61] In December 2007 Ecma International announced that many of reported issues will be taken into account in next edition of the standardisation proposal to ISO.^[62]

[edit] User base argument

The most widely used office productivity packages currently rely on various proprietary and reverse engineered binary file formats such as doc, ppt and xls. For users of the binary formats there could be an advantage to migrating to an open XML standard that maps the features of previous binary file formats. The Office Open XML standard explicitly states this as a goal, in order to preserve investments in existing files and applications.^[63]

[edit] Microsoft key benefits arguments

Microsoft makes the following claims about the benefits of Office Open XML as compared to the format currently used with Microsoft software: integration of business information with documents, open and royalty-free specification, compact and robust file format, safer documents, easier integration, transparency and improved information security, and compatibility.^[64]

[edit] Policy arguments

With regards to the alleged overlap in scope with the OpenDocument format, Ecma has provided the following policy arguments in favor of standardization: overlap in scope of ISO/IEC standards is common and can serve a practical purpose; Office Open XML addresses distinct user requirements; The OpenDocument format and Office Open XML are structured to meet different user requirements; and Office Open XML and Opendocument can serve as duo-standards.^[65]

[edit] Technical arguments

• The use of the Open Packaging specification which allows for Indirection, Chunking and Relative indirection.^[66]
• Uses the ZIP format, making ZIP part of the standard. Due to compression, files are smaller than current binary formats.^[66]
• It supports custom data elements for integration of data specific to an application or an organisation that wants to use the format.^[66]
• It defines spreadsheet formulas.^[67]
• Office Open XML contains alternate representations for the XML schemas and extensibility mechanisms using RELAX NG (ISO/IEC 19757-2) and NVDL (ISO/IEC 19757-4.)^[66]
• No restriction on image, audio or video types, Book 1 §14.2.12.^[66]
• Embedded controls can be of any type, such as Java or ActiveX, Book 1 §15.2.8.^[66]
• WordprocessingML font specifications can include font metrics and PANOSE information to assist in finding a substitution font if the original is not available, Book 3 §2.10.5.^[66]
• In the situation where a consuming application might not be capable of interpreting what a producing application wrote, Office Open XML defines an Alternate Content Block which can represent said data in an alternate format, such as an image. Book 3 §2.18.4.^[66]
• Internationalization support. For example date representation: In WordprocessingML (Book 4 §2.18.7) and SpreadsheetML (Book 4 §3.18.5), calendar dates after 1900 CE can be written using Gregorian (three variants), Hebrew, Hijri, Japanese (Emperor Era), Korean (Tangun Era), Saka, Taiwanese, and Thai formats. Also, there are several internationalization related spreadsheet conversion functions.^[66]
• Custom XML schema extensibility allows the addition of features to the format. This can, for instance, facilitate conversion from other formats and future features that are not part of the official specification.^[66]
• The format has features that can be used to enhance performance. For instance, SpreadsheetML has an optional performance feature to track which cells have to be recalculated when spreadsheet data changes.^{[citation needed]} In spreadsheet formats lacking this feature, all of the used cells in the entire spreadsheet must be verified at least once for recalculations of the spreadsheet.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Criticism

The standard has been the subject of debate within the software industry. Some of the participants in the approval process are generally supportive of eventual ISO standardization, but are unwilling to support the JTC 1 fast track process.^{[citation needed]} At over 6,000 pages in length, the specification is difficult to evaluate.^[68]Objectors also complain that there could be user confusion regarding the two standards because of the similarity of the "Office Open XML" name to both "OpenDocument" and "OpenOffice".^{[citation needed]}. Objectors also argue that an ISO standard for documents already exists and there is no need for a second standard.

[edit] Sources of opposition

Opposition originates from organizations and individuals including the free software and open source communities, FFII, OpenDocument supporters^[69] and technology companies that develop office software around the competing OpenDocument format, which was approved as an ISO standard in 2006, such as Novell^[70] and IBM^[71]. Office Open XML has been criticized by these organisations on technical and legal grounds.

In addition, the standardization process itself has been questioned, including claims of balloting irregularities by some technical committees, Microsoft representatives and Microsoft partners in trying to get Office Open XML approved.

[edit] See also

• OpenDocument standardization
• Comparison of document markup languages

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• DIS29500.org , the website containing all technical comments submitted prior to the BRM
• ISO-Vote.com - Try voting scenarios on OOXML