About Becta

We note that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has announced that Office Open XML (OOXML) has attracted sufficient support for it to be approved as an ISO standard. Subject to there being no formal appeals from ISO/IEC national bodies in the next two months the International Standard will, ISO indicates, proceed to publication. Such publication would have the effect of establishing two incompatible ISO standards in the important area of editable document formats.

During the standard approval process Becta wrote to the British Standards committee responsible for co-ordinating the UK’s response to the proposed Office Open XML standard asking that it considers carefully whether two different ISO standards was the best outcome that could be achieved in this important area. We were clear that the interests of non technical users (including most teachers and parents) would be best served by a single standard which accommodated the existing Open Document Format (ODF) specification, and any extensions necessary to provide the required compatibility with various legacy Microsoft formats.

We are also aware that the branch of the European Commission responsible for competition policy has announced it is investigating the extent to which OOXML, as implemented in Microsoft’s Office 2007 product, is interoperable with competitors' products. In practical terms one measure of openness will be the extent to which OOXML is adopted in Microsoft's competitor products over time.

There will remain the important practical issues of interoperability within schools and colleges in an environment of multiple ISO standards operating in the context of multiple document converters of varying effectiveness.

The issue of the interoperability with MS Office 2007 was a key factor underpinning Becta’s October 2007 complaint to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), now superseded by the European Commission’s ongoing investigation.

Pending the outcome of the Commission’s investigation, and the response of the wider marketplace, Becta’s advice to schools and colleges in relation to the use of Office 2007 and the OOXL file format remains as set out in our Final Report into Vista and Office 2007. That report confirmed:

• No widespread deployment of Office 2007 should take place until schools and colleges are sure that they have in place mechanisms to deal with interoperability and potential digital divide issues set out in the report.
• To ensure widest compatibility of files between different applications, users of Office 2007 should not save any files in Microsoft's new Office format (OOXML).
• Due to limitations in Microsoft's implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) international standard, users should in the short term continue to save files in the more widely adopted .doc, .xls and .ppt formats.

Becta will issue longer term advice on Microsoft Office 2007 product and on document interoperability once the results of the Commission’s investigation are known.