ZDNet has a detailed report on Microsoft's anouncement that it will submit the Office 12 XML-based document formats to the ECMA International standards group.

"Microsoft intends to submit file formats for its new Office 12 applications to the European standards body ECMA International. The company hopes this will allay concern about its level of control over document formats.

The company, which dominates the market for desktop productivity software, plans to provide the technical specifications of Office 12 file formats to ECMA early next month. The technical committee is also being sponsored by Intel, Apple Computer, NextPage and some European customers, including British Petroleum and the British Library.

The creation of a fully documented standard submission derived from the formats, called Microsoft Office Open XML, will likely take about a year, Microsoft executives said. Once Microsoft Office Open XML is recognized as an ECMA standard, the group of companies then intends to pursue standardization at ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, which is particularly influential among government customers."

Robert Scobe has posted an interview with Jean Paoli about the decision to standardize the file formats on Channel 9.

Microsoft's Brian Jones adds additional details on his blog:

"Today we are making a really important announcement about our XML formats. We are going to bring the Microsoft Office Open XML formats to a standards body with the intention of eventually making the formats an ISO standard. This should really help everyone feel certain that these formats will always be available and fully accessible. We are going to work with Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba to form a technical committee at ECMA International that will fully document all of our schemas so that anyone can understand how to develop on top of them. This is obviously a huge step forward and it really helps to increase the value of these document formats because of the improved transparency and interoperability. This will help to create a large ecosystem built around these formats that will support them in a large number of different scenarios for customers."