This week is crucial for all of you who work on computers. The International Organization for Standards (ISO) will decide on September 4, 2007 what standards it wants to approve for digital documents in the country.

While a standard by its very definition rules out a choice or confusion, there is hectic lobbying going on for two standards for documentation in India. The lobbies are pulling no stops to convince the ISO on the merits of having two standards in India. Individual users like you and me don't have a say in which standard would you like to see accepted in the future.

These standards will affect the most used application on the computer. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are ubiquitous, but the code and protocols that go into those products have been owned and zealously guarded by Microsoft all these years. The "closed" format obviously makes it difficult, in a technical sense, for other programmes to communicate with Microsoft's products.

OpenOffice, an office productivity suite launched a few years ago by Sun Microsystems, has been a pretender at best, but it comes with a few advantages: it's free, and the source code is open for all to download, modify, and improve. That is why other products such as Google online tools use ODF.

OpenOffice uses the open document format (ODF); it has the support of almost every software entity outside of Microsoft, including Microsoft's bitter rivals Sun, IBM, Google, and Red Hat. More important, governments, regulators, and academia around the world have been increasingly favoring ODF.

To counter ODF, Microsoft released what it claims is an open standards documentations protocol, Open Office eXtensible Markup Language (OOXML). It has the support of Novell, Apple, Quark, Accenture, and of some Indian IT heavyweights such as Infosys, Satyam, and HCL.

Globally, the ODF vs OOXML debate appears to be weighted in favour of the former. In India, Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) is responsible for voting to ISO for which standard the country wants.

BIS has been evaluating both the standards for more than a year now. It had appointed a committee headed by D B Phatak of Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology for an assessment. Based on the committee's recommendation the BIS will say yes, no, or abstain on the vote for one of these standards to be accepted by the International Standards Organization (ISO).

At the August 23 meeting of the BIS committee, the Mr Phatak threw out 120 of the 200 objections to the acceptance of OOXML as a standard in less than 45 minutes. Still 17 of the 21 members of the committee rejected approving OOXML as a standard, confirming India's stand that there should be just one standard globally which would be ODF.

Which standard do you want to vote for?