Oasis sets new standard for Office documents

The Oasis standards group has approved the adoption of the OpenDocument format for office applications as an official Oasis standard, potentially providing an open alternative to Microsoft's formats.

Office productivity applications and the documents they create are key to today's knowledge economy, said Michael Brauer, chair of the Oasis OpenDocument Technical Committee and Sun Microsystems employee. Today, for the first time in the 25-year history of office applications, such documents can be stored in an open, standardized, and vendor-independent format.

The Open Document Format for Office Applications v.10 specification, commonly known as OpenDocument, is based on the XML schema developed by the OpenOffice.org open source applications community.

It will be used in the forthcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0, as well as Sun's StarOffice 8, which is due for release in the summer. A royalty-free XML-based file format, OpenDocument, covers text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

The format was submitted to Oasis for consideration as a standard by Sun in 2002 and is designed to be an open format that could be used by any office suite or similar applications. Its acceptance as a formal standard does not necessarily mean that more vendors - or users - will adopt it, but it does give supporters a significant argument against Microsoft's de facto Office schema standards.

Dealing with Microsoft's proprietary standards has been a well-documented problem for OpenOffice.org and Sun's StarOffice, leading to early versions of their products too often being dismissed as incompatible with Microsoft documents.

Compatibility has improved in recent versions, but without access to Microsoft's formats, the developers of Office alternatives still found themselves chasing a moving target. While Microsoft has been more open with its formats in recent years, it has still stopped short of handing them over to a standards body, despite being encouraged to do so by the European Commission.

Microsoft initially published its XML reference schemas for Word, Excel, and InfoPath in 2003 to developers and end users under royalty-free licensing agreements following discussions with the Danish government, which was building an online library of XML schemas.

While Microsoft in 2004 also met requests from the EC's Interchange of Data between Administrators initiative that it issue a public commitment to publishing and providing non-discriminatory access to the XML schemas, the company declined the invitation to submit the XML formats to a standards body, citing issues of maintaining backwards compatibility.

The OpenDocument format has already received the support of Sun, OpenOffice.org, IBM, Novell, and Stellent. Whether Microsoft will be added to this list remains to be seen but it would be hard for the company to maintain a commitment to standards if it does not.

With such a dominant position in the Office application space, Microsoft is in a position to influence how successful OpenDocument will be, but ultimately if users continue to use the usual Microsoft formats, then the importance of Microsoft's formats will remain.

In announcing OpenDocument, Oasis president and CEO Patrick Gannon cited many organizations and government from around the world that have been calling for an open, safe, standardized schema for office documents. If OpenDocument is to succeed, these organizations will have to step forward and adopt it.

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