The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC has officially and unanimously approved ODF 1.2 as a Committee Specification. The new version of the standard has taken four years to complete and has been adopted by many applications already. Next stage is the official vote within OASIS to adopt this specification as an OASIS standard.

After a recent meeting of the SC 34 committee, the ISO/IEC group responsible for OOXML, Groklaw are reporting that they believe Microsoft are trying to take control of the Open Document Format (ODF), the uncontroversial open document format standard.

In Part I of this OOXML update, my first post on the topic in over a year, I showed you how Microsoft maintains strong control over the OOXML standard.

Polish Technical Committee no 171 has just voted 80% against the adoption OOXML as an ISO standard [PL]. It’s not the end of the game though, since committee 171 which was first planned to make the decision does not make the final decision anymore. Another committee 182 — will be voting on the same issue soon!

Technical Committee 182 decided on August 30th to accept Microsoft format Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Another committee already voted against OOXML last week, but the KT 182 decision is the final vote of Poland sent to ISO on August 31th.

This is different. There is a report by Borys Musielak of PolishLinux.org that Poland met to vote on OOXML on Thursday. Of 45 members of the committee eligible to vote, 24 showed up to vote, and it split almost down the middle, with 12 for, 10 against and 2 abstaining. This is extraordinary, since Poland voted yes in September, despite the technical committee being opposed. I call that progress.

Michael Brauer, the OpenOffice.org XML project lead and OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee Chair, has written a blog entry about the progress of native Office Open XML (OOXML) import filter development for OpenOffice.org. Brauer explains the importance of supporting OOXML in OpenOffice.org and also describes some of the challenges associated with supporting an emerging document format.

"As you will recall, V1, the INCITS Technical Committee that addresses document format standards, was unable to reach consensus on a recommended US vote to either approve or reject DIS 29500, the draft ISO/IEC standard that describes Microsoft's OOXML formats. As expected, Microsoft is seeking to gain a US vote in favor of OOXML..."

An esoteric-but-key technical committee will recommend that the U.S. maintain its support for making Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format an ISO-certified open standard, despite controversy at a meeting last week discussing fixes to the proposed specification.