I have heard a number of answers to this question over the last year or so, and from the divergent responses I think it is worth taking a moment to share my personal interpretation as to what I believe ISO ratification of the Ecma Open XML standard brings and who will benefit.
The first thing to note is that being an ISO standard does not make choices for anybody, once a standard is ratified by ISO nobody has that standard mandated for them by anybody as a result of the ISO process. Indeed there are many ISO standards that either never see full market adoption or see strong adoption which then dwindles as some new technology takes hold.
An example of this might be the x400 email standard (or IS10021), which while it is still used in some sectors is nowhere near as pervasive as the SMTP email protocol that almost all of us use to converse daily.
What ISO standardization does bring is a process that has been in place for a number of years that is designed to ensure that the voices of member countries from around the world are heard in the ratification process, and that the end result serves the widest possible group of constituents.
The process is well defined, it puts in place intellectual property management policies, technical quality controls and maintenance processes that benefit anybody who chooses to use the final standard.
The key for me though, is that the highest level of relevance for any ISO standard is for those who choose to use it. At the end of any ratification process the newly minted standard is added to the comprehensive library of standards that ISO maintain and can be pulled down off the shelf by anybody who wants to take a look and/or use it. For anybody who does not want to use it the document can be simply left sitting on the shelf.
Today the market contains large numbers of users, independent software vendors and systems integrators who have an investment in both data held in the binary document formats and the Ecma Open XML format. They will be the ones who will use the Open XML format to represent their existing data with fidelity or to build new types of applications using the Open XML specification, indeed as I have talked about in earlier posts many organizations are already using the draft ISO document to do this.
So, who benefits. To my mind there are three main groups who will benefit from the Ecma Open XML spec being ratified as a standard by ISO;
- Anybody who currently has a store of documents in the Microsoft Office Binary formats and would like to convert those to Open XML to ensure that the documents remain accessible for years to come.
- Anybody who wants to interoperate with other applications and platforms that also support the Ecma Open XML document format.
- Anybody who wants to be able to embed additional data into their documents and use those documents as part of a larger business process or as a service in a larger architecture.
Many constituents of these groups are already starting to make use of the wider range of choices that are emerging, and I’m confident that what we are seeing today is only the beginning of a significantly more open future for digital documents in general.
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