At the General Assembly meeting on 8 December 2005, Ecma International has created Technical Committee 45 (TC45) to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications that is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats.

The aim is to have this standard implemented on a wide set of tools and platforms.

The creation of TC45 was proposed by Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage., Statoil ASA and Toshiba that are co-sponsoring this initiative.

By standardizing and fully documenting the Office Open XML formats, existing Office documents can be converted to the Ecma XML standard format with no loss of data, formatting, properties, or capabilities. This will facilitate document contents access, search, use, integration and development in new ways. Documents and public records can also be created, archived, and maintained with long-term industry support.