FAILED PROTEST: Despite worldwide opposition, Microsoft's OOXML has been accepted as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization, a move that puts the fate of China's indigenous document format standard in question

XINHUA

Since Microsoft's Office Open Extensible Markup Language (OOXML) document format was accepted as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization in early April, China's own document format standard Open Document Format (ODF) has been forced to make a decision.

The world now has two international standards for sharing office productivity suite files. OOXML is used in Microsoft Office 2007 for sharing Word, Excel and PowerPoint file information. The rival standard, ODF, which was approved as an international standard in 2006, is used in Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org and IBM's Lotus Symphony open productivity suites, among others.

The issue about document format standards is even more complicated in China, because there is also the national standard UOF. Consequently, Chinese standardization organizations now have to decide what to do: Do they support a third standard or unify UOF with one or both of the international standards?

According to Ni Guangnan, an academic with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the reason for developing an indigenous document format standard is that the lack of compatibility of documents generated by existing Chinese office application software products has limited sales of these products, leading vendors to seek a common format standard based on XML.

UOF, which was first started in January 2002, was developed by Chinese office software vendors, application integration vendors and research institutes. It has been recognized by key government agencies, including the Standardization Administration of China, the Information Office of the State Council, the Ministry of Information Industry (now the Ministry of Industry and Information) and the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The options

In recent years, there has been opposition to OOXML becoming an international standard. China's software producers, IT experts and netizens had urged the government to vote against Microsoft's document standard at the meeting of the International Organization of Standardization in September 2006.

Yang Chuanyan, Secretary General of Co-Create Software League, a non-profit Chinese software organization, told Xinhua News Agency, "An international standard cannot be built on the proprietary technology of a single company." He said a document standard has to be open for anyone to develop applications to operate on saved files.

Microsoft failed to win the necessary two thirds of votes in the first round of voting by national members of the International Organization for Standardization in September 2007. However, in the second round, concluded in late March this year, it received 75 percent of approval votes of p-members of JTC1 and its OOXML was approved as the second international office suite standard after ODF.

Microsoft has developed a converter to translate between documents based on OOXML and the approved international standard by the ISO, ODF. The company said that it is also working to develop a converter between OOXML documents and those based on China's national standard, UOF.

However, the potential converter between OOXML and UOF has not appeased Chinese software users. "There are too many contradictions between OOXML and UOF, which means almost no converter can make a 100 percent accurate translation while a lot of users, such as governments, require absolute similarity, not only in content but also in lines," said Hu Caiyong, Manager of Beijing Redflag CH2000 Software Co. Ltd.

Other industry experts bemoaned the time it would take to develop software compatible with OOXML, and the effect its use would have on strengthening Microsoft's monopoly on the software market, at the expense of smaller entrants.

"OUF should break the monopoly of Microsoft and take the dominating place in the domestic market to safeguard the country's information security," said Ni with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, who explained that as a basic standard in the information industry, the document format standard is concerned with the control of information resources. Since the 1990s, Microsoft's office software began to dominate the world market, and its acceptance as the world's second document format standard would help enhance the company's monopoly, Ni added.

There is also a suggestion to integrate UOF and ODF against OOXML. "Considering the potential Chinese market and the maturity of the self-developed software, the integration of UOF and ODF is quite realistic and able to gather enough strength to fight OOXML," said Redflag's Hu.

China's software companies had been united in disapproving OOXML becoming an international standard. However, one of them began to embrace the new standard after it was officially approved. In a public announcement, Kingsoft Co., China's largest software developer, said it supported open and standard document formats, including OOXML and ODF.

Other software companies might follow Kingsoft to accept OOXML as standard, which would mean a dim future for China's own UOF standard, said Yuan Meng, Deputy Secretary General of China Open Source Software Promotion Union.