Stories about: Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards

Sun Microsystems Monday urged a Massachusetts state official to rethink an opinion that Microsoft's Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) meets the state's parameters for an acceptable open document format just because it has been submitted as an open standard.

A group of high-profile technology vendors have formalised plans to promote Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as a global standard after a meeting at IBM last week, according to an IBM executive.

IBM and Sun Microsystems will host a private meeting Friday to rally industry support for OpenDocument, a specification for standardizing documents that proponents hope will spur adoption of software that competes with Microsoft's Office productivity suite.

The OpenOffice.org Project on Thursday released OpenOffice.org 2.0, adding new features that the group claim will resonate with users from business and governments right down to the home desktop. The product will be simultaneously released for a range of operating systems including Linux and Microsoft Windows.

A standards body will soon consider adopting the file format used by the OpenOffice.org software suite, among others, as an international standard.

Sun Microsystems has worked to improve the compatibility of its StarOffice application suite with Microsoft's Office, but it still faces an uphill climb as it tries to entice corporate users to consider the new version released on Tuesday.

Sun Microsystems plans to release a new version of StarOffice that includes new features to address the software's compatibility with Microsoft Office, one of the chief areas of complaint among users of Sun's office productivity suite.

Looking to ease the way customers manage their digital identities, Microsoft has begun working to integrate its InfoCard authentication technology with Internet Explorer and is in discussions with the Firefox and Safari browser developers to have them include the technology on their platforms.

Open-source leaders have called for a boycott of standards from the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), in response to a new OASIS policy on the use of patents in its standards.

As part of a plan to increase the use of strong authentication in the enterprise, RSA Security has released five specifications for various One-Time Password (OTP) methods, and plans to turn them into open standards.

A standards body developing security and policy improvements for the next version of a Web services-based registry specification stamped its work as an official standard on Thursday.