My colleague Good Hyun in South Korea has posted a story from Korea’s Electronic Times who are reporting that KATS have voted to APPROVE DIS29500.
His english translation of the text of the story reads;
Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) positioned to be supportive
Korean Agency for Technology and Standards announced its final decision on Microsoft OpenXML “international standard” voting. KATS, who has the representative voting right in Korea, is to vote for OpenXML, on the closing day of voting.
“Our committee agreed to support OOXML from the vote on March 27th. Among 13 committee members 9 agreed and 4 objected. As ECMA accepted and documented most our requirement, that highly affected this decision.” said source from KATS.
This is a fantastic outcome from an extremely well respected standards body here in the Asia Pacific geography.
Here is a link back to Good Hyun’s post.
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How can you say that this is a *fantastic* outcome ? MS OOXML is deeply flawed and so not suitable to ISO fast tracking. It is possible that the issues may be resolved with enough work, but it cannot go forwards with the problems that it has.
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There are 100s of ISVs around the world (including several in South Korea) who are building solutions using the draft spec today that would disagree with that comment.
I think it’s a fantastic outcome.
As an ISV we’ve built a bunch of applications that work with the ECMA 376 document format. See http://www.textglow.net for an example.
We are looking forward to being able to upgrade our software to support the new ISO/IEC 29500 OOXML specification. We don’t think the upgrade is going to be too onerous. There were no major revisions required as part of the BRM process.
Having OOXML as an ISO standard is great for us as it allows us to have far more input into the document format on which we rely than if it had stayed an ECMA standard. As the defacto XML format for office productivity applications it’s going to be broadly deployed regardless of which way the vote goes.
I’m watching with interest and growing confidence as the vote unfolds. Please to see NBs who have had their comments resolved moving to support the DIS.
“There are 100s of ISVs around the world (including several in South Korea) who are building solutions using the draft spec today that would disagree with that comment.”
You mean Microsoft Business Partners?
OOXML will profit the Microsoft Ecosystem, notably those who will rely on “your” SDK.
What a shame.
Nope, I mean 100s of ISVs, spread broadly across all parts of the industry.
I guess I should add OSS projects into that as well – OpenOffice 3.0 is a good example. Thinkfree in Korea is an excellent example of an ISV using the spec to build a product that competes directly with Microsoft Office.
Many of them are using the ecma-376 spec directly today (they will upgrade to IS29500 if it is ratified by ISO I suspect), some using the Microsoft SDK, some using the Java libraries and others using the PHP libraries that already exist.
Some are indeed Microsoft business partners, it is hard to avoid given that our 1.2m global partners represent some 60%-70% of the software companies out there. Many others, even at this early stage, are competitors of ours.
Great progress for a specification that is still in draft form.