Burton group analyst house strongly comes out in support of Office Open XML

The Burton Group, a respected AR firm targeting the enterprise technologist, has published “What’s up .doc—ODF, Open XML and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications” —a 35+ page examination of document formats, most notably ODF and Open XML. 

This is a very interesting read.  Guy Creese, one of the authors has blogged about it here. 

As he says in his post:

Please note that this overview, like all Burton Group research, is a completely vendor-independent perspective; Burton Group does not engage in vendor “white papers” or other vendor-paid writing projects. This is another way to say we'll probably ruffle some vendor feathers on this one, but we've tried hard to look into this objectively and in some detail (the report is 37 pages long).

It also builds on themes we’ve covered in other recent research, including next-generation hypertext, DITA and other means of improving XML content reusability, and XQuery. Collectively, we believe these advances will fundamentally improve the ways information workers collaborate and manage content.

As we do not have distribution rights I can't say any more but the paper takes a very balanced, non religious and thorough look at what ODF and Open XML bring and how customers can get value from them. 

You can get a free copy of it (for a limited period) direct from their site here.  This is well worth a read if you are involved in deploying Office 2007 or in debates about the standards.