After a bitter, year-long fight filled with finger-pointing and muckraking, it’s finally over.

Microsoft has won its battle to have its Office Open XML document format approved by the International Standards Organization (ISO). The OOXML format, which is already an ECMA-approved standard, failed to win ISO approval when it was first examined by the group’s 87 member countries in September, 2007. However, due to a heavy and highly controversial lobbying campaign waged by Microsoft and several key member countries over the intervening months, a final ballot was called. Voting ended Saturday.

An official announcement from the ISO is expected later Wednesday [Update: The ISO has made it official]. The Geneva-based organization said it would only release a statement after all of the voting nations had been notified of the decision. However, the International Herald Tribune spoke with an anonymous source involved in the ISO vote who confirmed Microsoft’s win. The software company released a statement late Tuesday applauding the impending announcement.

This is a huge win for Redmond. OOXML is the native
file format for Microsoft’s latest versions of its Office suite of
desktop apps. Now that it’s a standard, OOXML and newer versions Microsoft Office can be adopted by
governments and large institutions, many of which require ISO-approved
standards for all document storage, without worry. Microsoft was in
danger of losing the lucrative customer base for its Office suite — the company’s second-biggest cash cow behind Windows — as long as it lacked the
ISO’s rubber stamp.

The OOXML format received approval from 24 of the 32 countries eligible to vote in the process. The ISO’s rules state that to win approval, you need the support of at least 66 percent of what it calls core voting members, with no more than 25 percent of the total ISO member countries opposing. Only 10 of the ISO’s 87 member countries opposed the format becoming a standard. Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Iran, New Zealand, South Africa and Venezuela all stood opposed.

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As we mentioned previously Microsoft promised Mac users an update to Office for Mac 2008 to address stability and performance issues with the new software. And indeed the Microsoft Mac BU has delivered.

In an e-mail to Wired News, Microsoft writes that version 12.0.1 adds “suite-wide stability and performance improvements.” The knowledge base page adds that the update “fixes critical issues in Office 2008, including issues that might cause Office 2008 applications to stop responding or quit unexpectedly.”

Additional details can be found on Microsoft’s info page, but among the notable changes are extensive bug fixes and stability updates for Word and Excel. Entourage, the Mac equivalent to Outlook, also gets some attention with improved syncing capabilities and better mail store stability.

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Microsoft is opening up the Office Live Workspace Beta to the general public. Anyone with a Live ID can sign up today for free. Of course if you’re planning to actually create and edit documents with Live Workspace, you’ll need to pony up for a licensed copy of Microsoft Office.

We looked at Office Live Workspace when the private beta launched late last year, and found the service lacking in features. Unfortunately the official launch hasn’t done much to improve things — page load times are slow, the interface is clunky and it lacks online editing and collaboration tools.

Despite a handful of new features, Office Live Workspace isn’t a real competitor for online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs. Nor does the service extend the functionality of Microsoft Office in any particularly compelling way.

Which is too bad since Microsoft has a great opportunity to deliver much more, but as it stands now, Office Live Workspace is little more than an online storage service for existing MS Office users.

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Zoho Writer, part of Zoho’s online office suite, has received a small but welcome update this morning. Most notably Zoho Writer now supports Microsoft Office 2007 .docx files. At the moment the support is for exporting Zoho documents as .docx files, though Zoho founder Raju Vegesna assures us that OOXML import options are in the works.

Also new in Zoho Writer is a very slick integrated thesaurus — just right-click a word and choose Thesaurus from the contextual menu. Zoho Writer’s thesaurus currently supports 10 languages, including Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian and Slovak.

Another welcome addition is the new “share with groups” option, which means you can share documents with multiple people without having to add each one individually. To share a document with a group, just click the ‘Share’ button and select the ‘Share with Groups’ tab. New groups can be created new groups in your ‘My Account’ section.

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If you’re looking for a way to get Microsoft Office 2007 OOXML documents playing nicely with your OpenOffice programs, the Open XML Translator is what you’re after.

Open XML Translator is a free OpenOffice plugin that adds support for the new OOXML formats. Although the .deb files are specificly geared toward Ubuntu, they should work with similar Debian-based Linux distros.

Don’t expect flawless conversions of complex OOXML files, but for most people the converter should be able to extract usable text which you can then save in more widely supported format.

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