Microsoft loses bid to have &#39;Office&#39; format registered as standard
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US software giant Microsoft has lost its bid to have its Office software package format registered as an international standard, the body charged with regulating such matters said on Tuesday.
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Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format.
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Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft&#39;s format and the possible standard.Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company&#39;s Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to &quot;promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers.&quot;The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft&#39;s Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML&#39;s rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
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In a heavy blow to Microsoft&#39;s intellectual property rights, the US Patent and Trademark Office has initially rejected Microsoft&#39;s patent claims on the universally popular FAT (file allocation table) file system.
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In a blog post, Google supports ISO's decision to reject Microsoft's OOXML as a standard.
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Microsoft on Thursday released a plug-in for Office 2007 that will allow users to save their documents in both PDF and XPS formats. The company previously planned to build in such capability, but bowed to pressure from Adobe to force customers to download it.
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IBM has taken the lead in lobbying against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML format. But it does support the format in a few products -- a fact that some Microsoft bloggers were happy to point out.
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I have no problem with Microsoft operating in a market environment. Given a choice, I am sure many of us would gladly pay for Windows and Office rather than use Linux and Open Office.
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Internet engineers working on a standard for identifying the source of email messages voted down a proposal by Microsoft to include some of that company&#39;s intellectual property in the specification.
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Sun Microsystems is backing European Union efforts to standardize office document formats, including a proposal that would enable people to switch easily between Microsoft-based documents and those created with open-source software.
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As expected following news Monday that Microsoft would finally comply with the European Union's requirement that it make parts of its Windows source code available for distribution to developers, the Redmond company has officially dropped its appeal of the original 2004 antitrust ruling, as well as an appeal of the fine imposed in July 2006.
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Microsoft lost a major appeal Wednesday when a European court ruled that the world&#39;s largest software company must comply with sanctions imposed by regulators and strip features from its Windows product.
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Microsoft Corp. will be forced for the first time to offer a version of its flagship Windows operating system stripped of a major feature, based on a court order issued yesterday.
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Microsoft on Friday said it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the Office Open XML (OOXML) file-format standards process.
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New versions of Office, Exchange, too. But are businesses ready to buy?
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Redmond's 'open' standards approved Massachusetts is back on the Microsoft bandwagon. Nearly two years ago, the US state unveiled a policy that required its agencies to abandon Microsoft's Office applications in favor of apps that use "open" standards, such as the OpenDocument format (ODF).â¦
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Latest service pack for productivity suite renders older file formats--including those for Word, Excel, PowerPoint--inaccessible.