There has been some interest expressed lately regarding how soon Microsoft Office will offer full read/write support for the Strict conformance class of ISO/IEC 29500. I can certainly understand the interest in this topic from those involved in the standards process, as well as from our customers and other implementers. That’s why we’ve been looking into the issues and options for Strict support for quite some time. Many of you have observed our movement in this direction. Indeed, a member of WG 4 blogged about our progress toward Strict recently.

We generally don’t publicly discuss features this early in the product development lifecycle, but given the broad interest I’m going to share some of our thinking on Strict support here. We’re doing this to assure everyone involved that we understand – at all levels within Office – the importance of Strict support going forward. In short, we will support Strict no later than Office “15.” I’ll outline our general plans below, and ask you to stay tuned for more details as we get further into the Office 15 wave.

Source -
Doug Mahugh : Office?s Support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict

Posted By: JMH
07 Apr 2010