Reference to the submission of the ISO/DIS 29500 “Information technology — Office Open XML file formats” under the Fast Track Procedure, Kindly note that Jordan represented by the Information Technology Association of Jordan (INTAJ) and its members in addition to other large national IT companies greatly support the publication of the ECMA International’s Open XML Standard as ISO/IEC Standard (as shown in attachment 1 below). This resolution has been reached after studying ISO/DIS 29500 carefully and ensuring that such standard doesn’t represent any contradiction with other ISO/IEC standards such as the Open Documents Format (ODF). Actually INTAJ is an ICT industry-support association that embraces Jordan’s ICT businesses, with a mission to promote their advancement on a local and International level, and enhance their capacity and performance. This goes in parallel with improving the dynamics of Jordan’s ICT market and catalyzing all Jordan’s ICT related activities. In light of this issue, let us also emphasize the importance of this vote as Open XML represents an important advance in document standards that offers benefits to technology users, IT industry, consumers, business and government worldwide. Its publication benefits organizations that intend to implement applications capable of using the format, commercial and governmental entities that procure such software, and educators or authors who teach the format. Ultimately, all users enjoy the benefits of an XML standard for their documents, including stability, preservation, interoperability, and ongoing evolution. Consequently, the approval of ECMA International’s Open XML Standard as ISO/IEC Standard will enhance marketplace adoption, broaden choice, and is fully consistent with what has been done in other areas of technology (e.g., image formats, such as JPEG, TIFF; digital video formats, such as MPEG-2 and H.264; and document formats, such as HTML, ODF, and PDF/A), where overlapping standards (including multiple ISO/IEC standards) that address distinct user needs have been approved and have substantially benefited customers. It is well known that Open XML is a new open standard document file format that is being used by many vendors and users, including open source developers (as shown in attachment 2 below) for the reason that the Open XML Formats specification is optimized for the level of precision and detail required to carry forward billions of existing files, including a complete specification for spreadsheet. The Open XML Formats also offer the unique capability of hosting custom-defined data languages within the document format. This capability is a key innovation for developers seeking to incorporate real-time business information into their documents, or those who seek to “tag†documents with their own categorization system. The Open XML format standardization effort represent a very focused effort to write down in a standardized way the sum of information used in the already proven domain of existing binary formats while preparing for future enhancements and evolution. Although Open XML and ODF are both intended to describe office documents, each is designed to satisfy different user requirements. Open XML has been designed to be capable of faithfully representing the majority of existing office documents in form and functionality. It is designed to replace existing binary document formats with easily accessible, open formats to meet a wide variety of user needs, formats which capture identical information yet are extensively documented, and can be implemented on a wide variety of operating systems and devices. Meeting this objective, while also satisfying many other goals, imposes stringent requirements on the overall design and architecture of the format. Among the other goals for Open XML are: Open and XML-conformant independence from proprietary formats and features Internationalization capabilities Compact file size (compared to the binary formats) Modularity Integration with business data Extensibility mechanisms Versioning capabilities that allow for forward compatibility Provision of accessibility features Further, standardizing the format specification and maintaining it over time ensure that multiple parties can safely rely on it, confident that further evolution will enjoy the checks and balances afforded by an open standards process. The compelling need exists for an open document-format standard that is capable of preserving the billions of documents that have been created in the preexisting binary formats, and the billions that continue to be created each year. Technological advances in hardware, networking, and a standards-based software infrastructure make it possible. The explosive diversification in market demand – including significant existing investments in mission critical business systems – makes it essential. Thank you for your support for Open XML. Jordan Institution for Standards and Metrology (JISM)

Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment JO-0001 (Modified: 2008-01-08) We thank Jordan for its participation in the DIS 29500 Standardization process, and we appreciate very much Jordan’s vote of confidence in our efforts, and the marketplace relevance of our specification. We note that a growing number of implementations of ECMA-376 are becoming available, including those released by Apple (Mac OS X Leopard, iWork 08, iPhone), Adobe (InDesign), Microsoft (Office 2007, Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, Office 2008 Mac OS X), Novell (Suse Open Office) , Google (Search / Preview), Mindjet (MindManager), Intergen, OpenXML/ODF Translator (Open Source project on Sourceforge), Dataviz (DocumentsToGo on Palm OS, MacLinkPlus on Mac OS X Leopard), NeoOffice, Altova (XMLSpy), MarkLogic (XML Content Server), Datawatch (Monarch Pro), QuickOffice (QuickOffice Premier 5.0 on Symbian), Altsoft (XML2PDF Server 2007) and those under development by Corel (WordPerfect), AbiWord, Gnome (GNumeric), Xandros, Linspire, Turbolinux and others. These implementations are now available on many platforms, including Linux, the Macintosh, Windows, and handheld devices (PalmOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile).