(Source: Business Wire)The two year effort of Ecma TC46 was rewarded on June 16, 2009 in Budapest, Hungary, with the Ecma General Assembly approval of ECMA-388, the Open XML Paper Specification. Work on the OpenXPS Document standard began in June of 2007 with the creation of the Ecma TC46 committee. Ecma members from across the international office and print systems industries, twenty companies in all, joined together to add their expertise to the initial Microsoft offering, upon which the OpenXPS Document standard is based. In addition to the Open XML Paper Specification itself, TC46 prepared and distributed, in advance of the Ecma General Assembly approval meeting, explanatory slides and a White Paper. During the voting process, the Ecma General Assembly noted that the efforts of TC46 to provide explanatory materials were most appreciated. These materials are available at http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC46-availabledocs.htm. Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, Secretary General of Ecma International, provided the following perspective at the conclusion of the Ecma General Assembly vote, "I am very glad that Ecma has completed the OpenXPS specification in a timely manner - that is so important to the IT industry. The Ecma TC46 group is one of the finest standardization groups that I have had the pleasure to work with."

The key trends that motivated the development of the OpenXPS Document standard are businesses' use of increasingly complex and colorful documents, concern with print related costs across the Fortune 500, workforces served by increasingly intelligent peripherals that operate on networks without a local host, and technology breakthroughs leading to the growing use of 3D in displays, printing, and document exchange. The OpenXPS Document standard answers these trends, providing a foundation layer that enables a variety of solutions addressing related user needs.