Proposed standard DIS29500 has big functional overlap with existing standard ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) which has been approved in the last year. However we think that office applications users will benefit from having Office Open XML standardized as DIS29500 if below mentioned comments are incorporated into the final version of standard. This is mainly because DIS29500 has features for representing common document elements which are not yet supported by ODF standard and it will took several years before those features are incorporated also into standardized ODF format. Another reason is OOXML’s ability to represent large corpus of existing documents (previously stored usually in proprietary binary formats) in an open and easy to process format. For each standard it is also important to gain mass adoption, otherwise its benefits are diminished. It seems that majority of office applications (in terms of market share) will support DIS29500 which is not yet case of ODF.
Coexistence of two very similar international standards such as ODF and OOXML is undesirable in a long term perspective. Therefore we ask JTC1 to start work on a progressive harmonization of both formats in cooperation with OASIS and ECMA organizations which are originators of these document formats.
There are many possible approaches for harmonization. For example, as the first step both formats could start to use the same unified packaging system based on OPC (as described in Part 2 of DIS29500). Moreover, OPC could be extended to support storage of alternative representations of a single object-single file then could contain one document stored in several variants (e.g. ODF, OOXML and XHTML). Applications will be then free to choose format which best fits their needs and capabilities.
In a long term it is recommended to carefully study both formats and then create unified abstract document model. ODF and OOXML formats will then serve just as alternative serializations of this data model. If experience will disclose weaknesses of both ODF and OOXML formats, it is possible to start thinking about creating completely new document data model serialization.

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