The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) has filed a complaint to the European Commission regarding Microsoft’s new file format, Open Office XML. The controversy issued over the fact that products of other companies are working poorly with the new OOXML.

BECTA is interested to find out whether the software giant has withheld information from its competitors on purpose. The issue is even more interesting since it is possible that some improper influence has been exerted over the International Standard Organization (ISO) to accept OOXML as a standard together with the older Open Document Format, a file format that was developed by Sun Microsystems and that has its full specifications made public.

The British commission has asserted that because of Microsoft products’ lack of interoperability, the British Educational System is paying more money on software products than it should. In 2005, the same commission published a study according to which British primary schools could save up to half their costs if they would choose open source software products, and give up the proprietary ones.

Another issue raised by the commission is the way Microsoft licenses its products to the schools. The company’s policy is that all computers in a campus must have Microsoft license. BECTA has considered this an anticompetitive practice.

According to the Associated Press, Microsoft’s spokeswoman Anne-Sophie de Brancion stated that “Microsoft is deeply committed to education and interoperability”, and that the company has started to develop tools that will enable Office to work better with files in ODF.