Microsoft’s pursuit of a global industry standard for its open-document format, which set off a protracted battle with its commercial rivals by the burgeoning market for interchangeable Web-based documents, is set to conclude that week after a final round of voting.

Delegations from as many as 87 nations were expected to have cast ballots by a deadline Saturday with the worldly Organization for Standardization, the standards-setting body in Geneva whose ISO designation could influence software purchasing by some governments and large businesses.

Advocates and opponents of Microsoft’s proposed standard, Office Open XML, or OOXML, declined Friday to predict the outcome, and an unofficial tally by the Malaysian delegation showed the outcome as too close to signal. An ISO spokeswoman, Sandrine Tranchard, said her group would publish official results early that week.

Industry experts said the outcome of the vote on the 6,000-page OOXML specification, which was steeped in arcane technical debate by software coding and licensing, could

have commercial ramifications for Microsoft, as well as for universal Business Machines and Sun Microsystems, which helped develop a rival technology called OpenDocument Format, or ODF.

ODF is so far the only interchangeable document format bearing an ISO standard, an endorsement that its backers have used to promote the technology to governments and businesses around the world. The ODF format, available at www.OpenOffice.org, lets users save text and spreadsheet documents in many formats, including Microsoft’s.

Microsoft, facing increasing client demands for interchangeable formats, responded by developing OOXML, but initially did not let users save documents as ODF files. Microsoft eventually relented and financed a free software add-on that enabled OOXML users to save documents in the rival format. OOXML was designated a European standard in December 2006 by a Geneva group called ECMA, previously known as the European Computer Manufacturers organization.

Through ECMA, Microsoft sought fast-track approval from the…

Original post by Top Tech News