Best-known for its ISO 9000 family of quality certifications, ISO's 6-month voting process on whether to grant special ISO 26300 status to ODF ended May 1 with "sweeping approval" from ISO members, according to Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Open Document Format Alliance. An exact tally of the votes was not immediately available on ISO's Web site.

Other popular technology formats that have received ISO approval in the past include HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format (PDF).

"This is a really powerful signal that ODF has arrived, and improves the prospect of it being incorporated into a range of products," said Marcich, head of the three-month old group. The ODF Alliance, an offshoot of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), counts more than 150 companies and organizations as members.

Based on the XML file format used by the open-source productivity suite, OpenOffice.org, ODF is meant to be a vendor-neutral standard for saving common office documents, such as memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, charts and presentations, according to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which submitted ODF to ISO last September.

Supporters such as IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Novell Inc. say ODF creates a reliable, open format that will be particularly useful for governments and organizations worried whether their archived digital documents will be readable in the future.