India Rejected Office Open XML

 ISO

In the meeting of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) technical committee Thursday, 13 members voted against the standard, while five members, including some outsourcing companies, and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) voted for making Open XML a standard.

Nasscom is in favor of multiple standards, including Open XML and ODF (Open Document Format), the association said in a statement. It added that technology neutrality and competition will lead to falling prices of IT products.

The technical committee was constituted by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), India’s national standards body, after moves by Microsoft and other organizations to make Open XML a standard of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

BIS is a founder member of ISO, and represents India at the ISO.

The BIS committee had voted in August against making Office Open XML a standard, although some participants said at the time that Open XML may be again reconsidered as a standard by the technical committee and BIS after Microsoft makes the required changes to the document format.

The India vote comes ahead of a March 29 deadline for ISO members to reconsider their votes if they wished.

While disappointed by the decision of the BIS committee, Microsoft said Thursday that it was however encouraged by the support of IT industry players like Nasscom, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Infosys who voted in favor of Open XML becoming an ISO standard.

source:pcworld 

Automatic Office 2003 SP3 in Feb

ofc2003

Those customers who haven’t already installed SP3 and have chosen to receive updates automatically will start receiving the service pack from February 27; although they will receive the update progressively, with not everyone receiving it on the same date, Microsoft said.

Microsoft made an announcement to this effect on Monday following several user complaints regarding security settings in Office 2003 SP3 that was released in September 2007. The settings blocked access to some of the older file formats.

The upcoming Windows Update contains numerous security- and stability- enhancements. Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 in particular has improvements to make Office 2003 work well with Windows Vista and other new Microsoft products.

It promises to give users greater control over which macros can run in Excel, as also patch identified security holes. It offers IT administrators new tools to protect against social engineering attacks.

Meanwhile, for those of you who don’t particularly fancy Office 2003 SP3 automatically installed on your computers, make sure not to set Microsoft Update to ‘Automatic’.

source:techtree