US to vote “yes” on Open XML

Similar to what we just saw from Germany earlier this week, the US has voted to approve Open XML as an ISO standard. The result of the vote for "yes with comments" is posted here: https://ballot.itic.org/itic/tallyvote.taf?function=vote&committee=INCITS&ballot_id=2341&_UserReference=96EBDF227BF339D246CE4E20

As I pointed out yesterday, Ecma has already publicly committed to dealing with all comments that have been raised by national bodies, and I've seen some pretty good ones coming in so far. The review that Open XML has undergone during this process has been phenomenal, and we'll see a much better specification as a result of it. I haven't seen many comments come through yet that will be too difficult to deal with, so it should be a fun several months working towards the Ballot Resolution Meeting. The majority of the comments are seeking to have bugs in the spec fixed, or further clarification on specific details.

We're already working within the Ecma TC to create a good system for collecting all of the comments and properly categorizing them as we've seen a number of the same issues come up in multiple countries. We're also looking into ways to assign any comment to a specific change in the spec. This way people can quickly see what the actual change was that resulted from their comment.

OpenXMLCommunity.org Quote of the Day:

Global Learning and Consulting Corp – Puerto Rico

"The adoption of Open XML as an international standard is a very important step, because it represents the most complete format for the type of documents used in productivity applications for the office. It makes it easier for our customer and us to generate, to process and - on a long term - to archive this information. Office Open XML will help to close the gap between processing structured and unstructured information in an easy, comprehensible and transparent manner."

- Ernesto Rivero – General manager

-Brian