Another word-processor supporting Open XML

It looks like AbiWord, which is an open source word processing application is now working on Open XML support. https://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/OpenXMLImport

They finished up inline formatting about a month ago, and I'm not sure what they are currently working on.

So, now we have AbiWord; iWork; OpenOffice; MS Office; Corel; Gnumeric; iPhone; NeoOffice; Palm reader (and a whole host of other applications and tools) supporting the Open XML format. Huge momentum, and we've only just started.

ISO Update

The 2nd round is now complete and the votes are all cast. I haven't seen the official numbers yet, but some of the early reports show that we already have about 74% of the voting countries in support of Open XML ISO approval. That's actually quite a bit higher than I was expecting (I thought we'd be closer to 60% at this point). There are two criteria that you must hit for final approval (2/3 or P members approval; 3/4 of all voting members approval), and it sounds like we'll be really close on both fronts.

This large scale support should set us up really nicely going into stage 3 of the fast track process. The Ecma TC 45 editor (with the help of TC 45) is now going to sort through all the comments coming in and work towards a more improved specification based on those comments. At that point we'll see a number of the countries who voted "no with comments" switch their vote over to "yes" and we should see Open XML approved after the ballot resolution meeting next year.

Between now and then though there is going to be a ton of work. There will be thousands and thousands of comments to work through. I'm confident that we'll be able to get some solid solutions in place that make it easier to sort and address the comments, but it's going to be pretty intense. I think we have some great momentum right now though which should make it easier for everyone to work together on reaching consensus.

-Brian

OpenXMLCommunity.org Quote of the Day:

Accenture Technology Consulting – Singapore

"Open XML will be a key standard to allow companies to share electonic documents. Approving this standard is key to move to true globalisation and provide services to anyone, anywhere, at any time in the world. Therefore I provide my full support and request that the standard gets approved."

- Andrew Weekes – Senior Executive