There are a couple of quite interesting developments in the office document formats discussion. One if them being that the Australian National Archive is now moving their entire content to ODF. This can be considered a major victory for ODF on the long road to broad government adoption.

A little mixed is the current situation at SC 34 of ISO regarding the formal standardization of ODF through ISO/ITU-T: since Microsoft recently joined the sub-committee working on this, there is the possibility that they are trying to stall the process, until their OpenXML formats make ECMA and thus go head to head with ODF.

Microsoft on the other side is now also sponsoring a community dedicated to working with their XML office formats. There is nothing about the binary formats (yet?), but it hosts a few interesting articles and links, including a high-level introduction to the packaging model.