The International Standards Organisation has declared Microsoft's OOXML document format an international standard. ISO said that cleared OOXML after considering appeals against its decision to approve Microsoft's standard, underlining that of the two ISO-certified document standards the market will eventually chose one. OOXML will receive the ISO/IEC standard number 29500 over the next few weeks, while the organization still accepts appeals.

Before the deadline expired, the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had received appeals from South Africa, India and Brazil against the adoption of Microsoft’s Open Office XML document format as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

OOXML, the default file-saving format of Microsoft Office 2007, is actually a rival to an already approved open standard, the Open Document Format (ODF).

A lot of experts argue that having two competing similar open standards defeats the purpose of having open formats in the first place, while others say that Microsoft built the format very complicated on purpose so it can't be fully translated into another format.

Initially the proposal was rejected in the “fast-track vote” ended September 2007, but re-entered discussion under joint technical committee rules. A ballot resolution meeting (BRM) later held in Geneva on 25-29 February 2008 resulted in a massive withdrawal of previously disapproval votes, which led to the approval of the document as an International Standard on March 29.

In early March, a stunning number of over 100 delegates from 32 countries attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva, which had to resolve the even more amazing 1,100 (yes, more than one thousand) comments registered by the 87 National Bodies which voted last summer with respect to Microsoft's specification that itself exceeds... 6,000 (yes, six thousand) pages. The BRM was hosted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).