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The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has put its decision to declare Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format a global standard on hold.

ISO, which was expected to take this decision shortly, had given participating countries two months to appeal against its February decision to make OOXML an international standard. In response, India, one of the founding members of the ISO, along with Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela said the OOXML file format is not fully compatible with other document formats and hence cannot be a universal standard.

According to a press release by the ISO, the appeals are currently being considered by the ISO secretary-general and the IEC general secretary who, within a period of 30 days (to the end of June), and following whatever consultations they judge appropriate, are required to submit the appeals, with their comments, to the ISO Technical Management Board and the IEC Standardisation Management Board.

The two management boards will then decide whether the appeals should be further processed or not. If they decide in favor of proceeding, the chairmen of the two boards are required to establish a conciliation panel, which will attempt to resolve the appeals. The process could take several months.

The Microsoft Open Office XML is a platform-independent open standard for word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets to help ensure that older files are readable, even if the program used to create them has changed significantly. Apple, Novell, backs the Microsoft Open Office XML. In India it is backed by Wipro, Infosys, TCS, and Nasscom.

On the other hand the Open Document Format (ODF) is supported by the Indian government, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Google etc.

OOXML competes with the Open Document Format, which previously won ISO approval. ODF is used in open source office productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org and IBM's Lotus Symphony package. Microsoft last week said it would add support for ODF, as well as the XML Paper Specification, Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), and China's Uniform Office Format, to Office 2007 through a service pack slated for release in the first half of 2009.