Now that Microsoft has gotten Office Open XML (OOXML) accepted as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), it has found itself in an interesting dilemma. Changes were made to OOXML at the ISO ballot resolution meeting and because of this, Office 2007 documents no longer conform to the current standard (ISO/IEC 29500). So says Alex Brown, leader of the ISO group responsible for maintaining the OOXML standard, in his blog.

According to a story on ZDNet.co.uk, Brown says it is up to Microsoft to now implement the standardized version of OOXML.

"Given Microsoft's proven ability to tinker with the Office XML file format between service packs, I am hoping that Microsoft Office will shortly be brought into line with the [ISO/IEC] 29500 specification, and will stay that way," he said. "Indeed, a strong motivation for approving 29500 as an ISO/IEC standard was to discourage Microsoft from this kind of file-format rug-pulling stunt in future. ... The question behind the question, for a lot of the current OOXML debate, seems to be: can Microsoft really be trusted to behave?"

Next up, Brown will test Office alternatives like OpenOffice.org to see if these applications conform to the ODF standard (ISO/IEC 26300). How well do you think the open source products conform?

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