Oasis Aims To Standardize Office Formats

Sun Microsystems this week contributed the file formats from its StarOffice application to the Oasis standards body and gathered up some vendor partners to try to build open XML standards for office apps.

Sun is joined by vendors such as Arbortext and Corel and end-user Boeing in the venture, which is kicking off this week.

The companies have formed the Oasis Open Office XML Format Technical Committee to build XML standards for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts and graphs.

The obvious target of the effort is Microsoft, which holds massive market share via its Microsoft Office suite and is itself using XML to make its proprietary Office file formats more flexible and open to querying and processing.

"Organizations have seen that their real corporate memory is held in office productivity applications, and that corporate memory rapidly moves beyond the reach of inquiry," said Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist. "The only way to access it today is via fragile, proprietary macro languages. [The OASIS effort] will create an open, XML-based file format that lets corporations reliably access that corporate memory."

Sun will contribute the current XML file format specs utilized in its OpenOffice.org 1.0 project, which handles the open-source development of its StarOffice suite.

While the Oasis group will start with the Sun contribution, it will tweak or change those formats as it sees fit and ultimately end up with free and open standards that can be used by any vendor or company on a royalty-free basis.