Standards New Zealand meeting on Office Open XML

Standards New Zealand to run workshop on Office Open XML:

Standards New Zealand will facilitate a two day industry meeting to assess stakeholder views on the suitability of a document on Office Open XML for publication as an International Standard.

Standards New Zealand, as New Zealand’s national Standards body holds the responsibility to cast this vote on behalf of New Zealand.

‘The aim of the meeting is to assess and understand New Zealand stakeholder views to allow Standards New Zealand to make an informed vote on behalf of New Zealand. This meeting will be independently chaired by Ms Alison Holt, the New Zealand delegate to the international committee JTC1 SC7 Software Engineering’ said Grant Thomas, Chief Operating Officer, Standards New Zealand.

The meeting will be held over the 23 and 24 August 2007 in Wellington.

I will have to find out how to make a postal or email submission. We have maybe 10,000+ Openoffice documents. I’ve fixed OO documents with zip and emacs. Two official ISO office document standards, is asking for pain. Especially when it flavors one company, no matter how important they are. That HTML as an example, probably would have been no Web 2.0 if Microsoft had managed to fork HTML.

1 Comment

  1. Richard Parry Said,

    August 17, 2007 @ 8:43 pm

    The question is, will you recommend OOXML or what? I mean, you’re probably going to recommend Open Office’s XML standard, rather than Microsoft’s, but the decision should probably be around which is the better standard 🙂

    I’ve done quite a bit of looking into this for government, it’s a thorny issue. From a government issue side of things the most important thing is that the documents have an open, self describing standard and both comply to that.

    Good luck 🙂 But I suspect that Standards NZ would be committing veritable suicide to suggest that Microsoft’s version wasn’t a standard in some way, because regardless of what they think the world will use it anyway. The good news is that, unlike .doc, this one’s actually open in that it’s got a published standard and a self describing format.

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