Ballots are rolling in for the final ballot to decide whether the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopts a file format based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as an international standard. Countries previously against adoption or abstaining, such as the Czech Republic, Denmark and Finland, are now voting in favor.

In the ballot, due to close on Saturday, 87 national standards bodies will have a chance to vote on adoption of OOXML as an international standard for office documents.

ISO already has one standard for office documents, OpenDocument Format (ODF), which has the backing of many of Microsoft's rivals, including IBM and Sun Microsystems. ODF is the native document format in a number of applications, including Sun's StarOffice, IBM's Lotus Symphony and the open-source application OpenOffice.org.

That corporate rivalry has made for an often-acrimonious voting process, as the technical committees advising national standards bodies typically include representatives from many of these companies.

ISO held a first ballot on adoption of OOXML last September, but the format failed to win approval from enough countries. ISO rules require that standards bodies voting against adoption of a draft standard give technical reasons for their disapproval. ISO then organizes a meeting to improve the draft in light of those comments, after which the countries that took part in the original vote have a month to examine the revised draft and decide whether to change their vote.

For OOXML, the ballot resolution meeting took place in Geneva at the end of February, and standards bodies have until Saturday to inform ISO if they wish to change their vote.

To become a standard, OOXML requires approval from three-quarters of all countries voting, and approval from two-thirds of "participating" or "P-member" countries. In September, it missed both targets, with 74 percent support overall and just 53 percent among the more powerful P-members.

Some countries have been swayed by the changes made to the draft.

Denmark announced Friday that it will now vote in favor, rather than against, while the Czech Republic announced a similar decision earlier in the week. Both are P-members.

Cuba, on the other hand, announced that it is now against, while Kenya, a P-member, has decided to abstain.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

Whitepapers

• Selecting Effective Virtual Directories
• Best Practices for HP Servers and HP Enterprise Virtual Array in a Microsoft Exchange
• Compliance, Protection, Recovery: A Layered Approach to Laptop Security
• Endpoint Security: Data Protection for IT, Freedom for Laptop Users
• IT Departments on Data Security: A Research Concepts Survey
• Laptop Security Tool Helps Allina Hospitals Track 97% of IT Assets

View more SOFTWARE whitepapers

Webcasts

• Managing the End User Experience-A Real World Example of Success
• Lowering the Cost of Email Archives
• Google Webcast: Why archive email? Top challenges and best practices
• High Availability for SQL Server 2005 Using Array-Based Replication and Host-Based Mirroring Technologies
• Technical Overview of Exchange Server 2007 with HP Servers and Storage
• Bringing Order and Security to your Mobile Workforce: Corporate Mobility Policy and Device Management On-Demand

View more SOFTWARE webcasts

Special Reports

• Application Performance Management Executive Guide
• Executive Guide: Building a Service Oriented Architecture
• IT Buyers Guide To: Collaboration

View more SOFTWARE special reports