Document Formats Survey Shows Growing Interest in XML-Based Standards

"IT managers at large organizations are increasingly interested in
employing XML-based standards, including Open XML, among their document
standards, according to a study of U.S. and European organizations
commissioned by Microsoft Corporation. The results of the survey,
which polled 200 government and private-sector organizations to better
understand which factors drive adoption of open document standards,
are available in an IDC white paper. Survey respondents included key
influencers as well as those charged with supporting document standards
in 200 organizations (100 in the U.S. and 100 in Europe). Fifty
organizations with more than 250 employees were selected from the
public sector, another 50 from the commercial sector. Functional
approaches to standards adoption were evident in the survey results,
with the majority of respondents citing interoperability between
productivity tools, long-term archiving, and ease of transition from
an existing base of documents to a new standard as the primary criteria
used to evaluate organizationwide adoption of a given standard. Other
key takeaways from this research include the following: (1) Large
organizations with diverse business needs prefer multiple document
standards. (2) Although IT managers appear to strongly prefer a single
standard to reduce cost and complexity of implementation,
line-of-business managers closer to the daily needs of business
support the desire for multiple document standards. (3) The standards
Portable Document Format (PDF), Open XML and OpenDocument Format (ODF)
are all in use today, with PDF viewed as the dominant standard and
Open XML demonstrating 'more traction in the market compared to other
XML-based standards.' (4) Companies in Europe with an interest in Open
XML expect to be piloting or fully deploying the standard a year
from today..." CHECK HERE See also the IDC report: PDF REPORT