Millions of people around the world have created billions of business productivity documents using Microsoft Office over the years � many of which are in the process of being archived and converted to more open, accessible and manageable digital content using XML technology.

To help businesses more effectively unleash the power of these documents, many of which are critical to everyday business-process improvement, Microsoft announced today it is co-submitting with a broad array of industry participants the Office Open XML file format technology to Ecma International, a well-known European standards body, for open standardization. This announcement follows an announcement the company made last June, in which it said it would make Office Open XML, the file format behind Microsoft Office documents, the default file format for the company's next version of Office, codenamed Office "12."

PressPass spoke with Jean Paoli, Microsoft's senior director of XML architecture and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to learn more about why Microsoft is standardizing on the Office XML file format and how customers will benefit.