The Ecma International Technical Committee TC45 has been working to establish a standard for Office Open XML File Formats as described in its program of work at http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm. The committee’s work began in December 2005, and has continued via weekly 2-hour conference calls and regular face-to-face meetings.

The committee held its sixth face-to-face meeting on September 26-28, 2006, this time in Trondheim, Norway. The meeting was hosted by Statoil and attended by twenty participants.

During the meeting, the committee created the Final Draft of the Office Open XML v1.0 format. The committee, with representation from all Ecma member organizations actively participating in TC45 (Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress) unanimously approved the Final Draft standard and agreed to propose it to the General Assembly of Ecma International for publication as an Ecma standard. The Final Draft standard will be made publicly available on the Ecma web site in the coming days. The GA will vote on this proposal during the GA meeting December 7-8, 2006.

AW: Also, an October CTP (Version 0.2-M3) of the Open XML Translator for Microsoft Word has been released. This release provides compatibility with the Office 12 Beta 2 Technical Refresh.