Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

This is good news:

The Word, Excel and PowerPoint file format specifications, which were previously only available from Microsoft by request, were published on Friday, together with details of an open-source Office binary-to-Office Open XML (OOXML) translator project.

The binaries were published in response to concerns among national bodies voting whether or not to ratify OOXML as an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard, according to Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones. The national bodies were concerned that third-party developers may have had difficulties converting Office binary formats to OOXML, referred to in the ISO ratification process as "DIS 29500".

This is happening In the wake of ISO ratification of PDF, and increasing pressure to provide an open format for all archived documents.