Some of you know me and know that I'm really interested in VSTO (that's Visual Studio Tools for Office) and that I've got a serious XML background having taught the XML Bootcamp for a number of years...
I've been following the Office Open XML standard for a while now but I just saw that Ecma is going to adopt the standard. Novell and Corel have already jumped on board to support this in Open Office. This is cool stuff...
Link to Press release 9 December 2005 - Ecma International creates TC45 to standardize Office Open XML File Formats