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The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the specification for a Microsoft-created file format that caused bitter debate during its path to become an international standard.

Sun Microsystems and IBM Wednesday announced the Open Document Format Toolkit Union, an open-source project aimed at making it easier for developers to use ODF.

For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

IBM is threatening to leave organizations that set standards for software interoperability because of concerns that their processes are not always fair.

Countries whose appeals were dismissed regarding the ISO/IEC's approval of Microsoft's OOXML as an international standard are questioning the judgment and relevance of the ISO/IEC and the standards they approve.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have given the green light to publish the Microsoft-backed Office Open XML (OOXML) specification after organization leaders rejected appeals from four countries to protest the vote that approved OOXML as a standard.

As companies embark on efforts to build loosely coupled service-oriented architectures they inevitably have to tackle the issue of securing their SOA service infrastructure, and many turn to XML security appliances to get the job done.

Microsoft's Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving's door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft's representative. And on top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises.

The SOAP stack for Web services was branded a failure this week by Tim Bray, a Sun Microsystems technologist and co-inventor of XML, who hailed the REST (Representational State Transfer) mechanism as a SOAP alternative.

The SOA concept -- developing a software architecture based on service components that can be mixed and matched as needed to reduce development time and increase application deployment flexibility -- is only a few years old, but the providers of SOA-supporting infrastructure are fast consolidating. Oracle captured the headlines with its acquisition of BEA Systems this spring, and Progress Software recently bought Iona Technologies.

The leaders of the ISO and the IEC have recommended the rejection of appeals from four countries that protested a vote approving OOXML, an XML-based document format submitted by Microsoft as an international standard.