As anticipated here at SYS-CON.com and elsewhere already yesterday, and despite world XML expert Tim Bray's observation - after the OOXML BRM - that the process is "irretrievably broken," Microsoft's OOXML has been announced today as the latest ISO standard - after more than 14 months of intensive review and controversy.

ISO/IEC DIS 29500 was originally developed as the Office Open XML Specification by Microsoft which submitted it to Ecma International, an information technology industry association, for transposing into an ECMA standard. Following a process in which other IT industry players participated, Ecma International subsequently published the document as ECMA standard 376.

Ecma International then submitted the standard in December 2006 to ISO/IEC JTC 1, with whom it has category A liaison status, for adoption as an International Standard under the JTC 1 "fast track" procedure. This allows a standard developed within the IT industry to be presented to JTC 1 as a draft international standard (DIS) that can be adopted after a process of review and balloting. This process has now been concluded with the end of the 30-day period following the ballot resolution meeting.

The process was open to the IEC and ISO national member bodies from 104 countries, including 41 that are participating members of the joint ISO/IEC JTC 1.

ISO/IEC DIS 29500 was originally disapproved in the "fast-track vote"which ended in September 2007, when 3 500 comments were received. However, under the rules of ISO/IEC JTC 1, the DIS vote was followed by a ballot resolution meeting (BRM) at which the comments were addressed. After the meeting, the ISO/IEC national bodies had 30 days to modify their votes if they wished.

The BRM was held in Geneva during the week 25-29 February 2008. By eliminating redundancies, the comments had been reduced to just over 1 000 individual issues to be considered. Issues considered as priorities by national members (such as accessibility, date formats, conformance issues) were discussed, and the other comments were addressed through a voting process on the remaining items, a system agreed by the BRM participants.

The issues addressed and revised have resulted in sufficient national bodies withdrawing their earlier disapproval votes, or transforming them into positive votes, so that the criteria for approval of the document as an International Standard have now been met. Subject to there being no formal appeals from ISO/IEC national bodies in the next two months, the International Standard will accordingly proceed to publication.