The growing flood of data that enterprises create and consume is doing more than giving rise to new storage technologies. It's also changing who is responsible for storage within IT departments.

Demand for storage capacity has grown by 60 percent per year and shows no signs of slowing down, according to research company IDC. New disclosure laws, which require more data to be preserved and retrievable, also are making storage management a bigger job.

Now, with network-attached storage, SAN (storage-area networks), virtualization, and other technologies shifting information and processing around within enterprises, a variety of changes are happening in the storage adminstration ranks.

"With the sheer complexity of some companies' information infrastructures, you wonder whether one person can really get their hands around it all," says Pund-IT analyst Charles King. The job has grown beyond taking care of storage arrays, he says. "It's really requiring storage administrators and executives, including CIOs, to think of it in a more holistic way."

The turning point for some IT departments seems to be the shift to centralized storage. Late last year, the University of Pittsburgh set up its first SAN and started moving its data out of servers and into its network operations center, says Jinx Walton, director of IT. Until then, every time a group in the IT department set out to meet a need on campus, the university's IT development team would assess how much storage was needed for the project and purchase it. The individual group would then manage that storage.

"Whoever was responsible for the project was responsible for the storage," Walton says.

But that was inefficient. Buying storage for individual servers and investing in additional disks when the servers filled up was expensive and a distraction, she says. After centralizing most servers in the NOC (network operations center), the university started building a SAN there and that was shared by all the project managers. Purchasing and management of storage shifted from the development realm to the NOC. It wasn't easy at first, Walton says.

"Any time there's any kind of change, there's concern about it," Walton says. But IT developers can now spend their time solving problems instead of handling storage, and they're happy with the change, she says.

At a large transportation company in the Midwest, what had been a niche storage project under a small team has gone mainstream.

IT administrators set up SANs about five years ago for data warehouses while keeping host-based storage in the rest of the IT universe, says an IT executive who asked not be named. At that point, the data warehouse team was responsible for the SANs. But recently the company expanded SANs to more of its IT systems in conjunction with adopting virtualization, and ownership of SANs has shifted to the production services department that manages IT as a whole, he says.

Tucson Electric Power was an early adopter of virtualization and networked storage, both of which have made the utility's IT operations far more efficient, says Chris Rima, supervisor of infrastructure systems. Two years ago, Tucson Electric hit a wall with data center growth.

"We're a power company, and we didn't have any more power coming in," Rima says. Virtualization put off for two years the need to build a new, improved, more efficient data center, which Tucson Electric is now building.

Storage has been a big part of the company's explosive IT growth. Data has doubled every year for the past three years, to 80TB at the end of last year. Among other things, Tucson Electric needs to store maps and high-resolution images of its coverage area so it can install power poles in the best locations, Rima says.

SANs and virtualization may have been the company's two saviors, but they have also made the IT department's work more complex. "They are so intrinsically linked, it's unbelievable," Rima says. This created a need for a new position: storage architect.

"Instead of somebody who's solely doing administration work ... the architect is somebody who takes a step back and says, 'OK, how do I design the architecture to take advantage of virtualization, data protection [and other factors]?'" Rima says.

That person needs to understand both storage and virtualization, and specifically technology from NetApp and VMware, Rima says. Finding the right person outside the company would have been virtually impossible, he says. So Tucson Electric trained a storage administrator, who is due for the promotion soon.

Adventist Health, a hospital operator in Roseville, Calif., had a generalist handling its data center until it implemented a SAN and virtualization. It then hired a small team of specialists for each new technology, says Greg McGovern, Adventist's CTO. Despite the supposed simplicity of centralized storage and processing, the company also is relying more on support from vendors, he adds.

"It looks simple on the surface. It looks complex when it stops working or slows down," McGovern says. If a doctor in the field complains an application running over the network has slowed to a crawl, vendor support is often called in. "I think I've got WAN engineers who can handle it, but I need more assurance," McGovern says.

Pund-IT's King thinks many more companies will face these kinds of challenges as storage grows rapidly in importance as well as in terabytes.

"People are still trying to get their heads around how to do this," King says. The falling price of storage equipment only makes things worse, he added. "Anybody can afford enough data storage to get themselves in trouble."

Sprint Nextel showed off a new iPhone look-alike from Samsung on Tuesday at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas that the operator says allows much faster data access then the Apple phone.

The Instinct, co-developed by Sprint and Samsung, looks similar to the iPhone, including a touch screen. Unlike the iPhone, however, it includes GPS and runs on Sprint's high-speed EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) Revision A network. Sprint's network offers an average data download rate as high as 1.4Mbps. By contrast, EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution), which the iPhone operates on via AT&T's network, usually offers less than 200Kbps throughput.

Users of the Instinct will be able to access the Web at high speeds, watch TV, download music, get directions, and access other entertainment services, said Dan Hesse, president and CEO of Sprint Nextel.

The Instinct features a 2.0 megapixel camera and comes with a 2GB microSD storage card. Sprint did not say how much the phone, which should be available in June, will cost.

The phone could be attractive to users of Sprint's new subscription plans, which Hesse said go further than competitors' plans. For $99, Sprint customers can get unlimited voice, text ,and data services. Other operators have recently rolled out similarly priced services that include unlimited voice but not unlimited data.

Sprint also hopes to make more applications available on the new phone by making it easier for developers to build applications for devices that run on Sprint's network, Hesse said. The operator plans to expand its virtual testing services so that developers can better test their new applications, and will update its software development kit to make developing for Sprint easier, he said.

Even while touting Sprint's existing network's broadband capabilities, Hesse also looked to the future. "EV-DO is still not fast enough for true broadband experience," he said. Sprint is building a WiMax network, already available after a soft launch in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area, to offer the next generation of wireless broadband.

Shane Macaulay's attempt to sell a hacked laptop complete with Windows Vista attack code did not last long.

eBay pulled the listing within hours of its appearance Monday, saying that it could have harmed users. "You can't sell anything that would do harm," said a spokeswoman for eBay's public relations agency.

The company removed the listing between 11 p.m. Monday and 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, Pacific Time, after eBay employees noticed the post. "It was the wording of the listing that caught the attention of the trust and safety experts who monitor the site," the spokeswoman said.

Macaulay won last week's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. He had offered the laptop he broke into for sale, claiming that his exploit code could probably still be extracted from the machine.

"This laptop is a good case study for any forensics group/company/individual that wants to prove how cool they are, and a live example, not canned of what a typical incident responce sitchiation [sic] would look like," his listing stated.

Although the laptop was listed on eBay just before April 1, a traditional day of Internet pranks, Macaulay insisted it was legitimate.

Macaulay, a researcher with the Security Objectives consultancy, was one of two hackers to claim laptops and cash prizes for penetrating systems during last week's contest. Organizers offered Vista, Mac OS, and Linux-based laptops for the taking, along with prizes that varied from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on the difficulty of the exploit. By Friday, however, only the Linux laptop remained unbreached.

Though the laptop he hacked runs Vista, Macaulay claimed that his Adobe Flash Player exploit will affect 90 percent of computers worldwide. He won a $5,000 cash prize, courtesy of 3Com's TippingPoint division, and the Fujitsu U810 laptop he had hacked into for his work.

Had Macaulay been able to sell his laptop before Adobe patched the issue, he would have violated his contract with TippingPoint, said Terri Forslof, the company's manager of security response. "We would have disqualified him from the program," she said.

The laptop had not been hit with any other attack code during the course of the contest, she added. "He was the only person who tried," she said.

Open source will start to dominate software infrastructure for providers of SaaS (Software as a Service) within three years. For them it's almost a no-brainer, according to Gartner analyst Yefim Natis.

"They will use it as much as possible," said Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

Lower cost and better flexibility, compared to what's available from closed source, or proprietary software, are key factors for the growing popularity of open source in this segment of the market.

In order to compete with on-premise vendors, SaaS providers will have to offer a lower cost, and open source helps them do that, according Natis.

One big difference between most enterprises and large SaaS providers -- or cloud-based providers, as Gartner likes to call them -- is technical know-how.

The latter are often very technically advanced, which means they can run open source by themselves.

"Since they don't require support, it's really free" said Natis.

For SaaS providers the cost of its infrastructure is also very important, since it in turns decides the cost customers will have to pay.

To keep costs low they have to optimize infrastructure, and open source is the best option to do that, according to Natis.

But for open-source vendors, the SaaS trend isn't all good news.

In next couple of years SaaS providers will also challenge open-source vendors, and become the preferred method for lowering IT costs.

Both promise lower costs. But moving to a service model requires less IT skills, while a move to open source often demands the opposite, according to Gartner.

Microsoft's Office 2007 is seeing strong adoption by corporate users that will only pick up steam over the next 12 months, according to a Forrester Research survey released Tuesday.

The driver for adoption is not necessarily the popular suite of productivity applications but the allure of integration of the Office client software with back-end Office servers, namely SharePoint . In fact, adoption of SharePoint is helping foster Office 2007 upgrades, according to Forrester.

Office's changing role has Microsoft positioning it as a front-end client for such tasks as document management, collaboration and unified communications .

With the Office 2007 suite, users can set up content management, integrate with online services, and deploy real-time communication tools and other infrastructures using any of the eight Office servers. That means Office is no longer a desktop decision made by the desktop team. It is also an infrastructure decision that ultimately involves IT.

"For large organizations, they are driven to move forward [with Office] given the improved support on the server side," says Kyle McNabb, the analyst who spearheaded the survey with nearly 300 IT professionals in North America and Europe. The independent study was conducted by Forrester online without any outside sponsorship or funding, according to the company.

"Those large organizations want the full experience with Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint in particular," McNabb says.

He adds that a subset of users also was driven to Office 2007 just by the desire to keep up with new versions or with licensing commitments.

"We don't have definitive data, but I would guess the majority, say 60-40, are driven by SharePoint rather than keeping current," McNabb says. And he adds that 92 percent of respondents named the combination of Office clients and back-end server options as being in line with their long-term strategies.

The survey, entitled "The State of Microsoft Office 2007 Desktop Adoption," showed that 43 percent of respondents have Office 2007 in use in their enterprise. Those results do not reflect a wholesale upgrade to Office 2007, however, because users were allowed to list all the Office versions they are running. Office XP topped the list with 60 percent, while Office 2003 came in at 46 percent. Office 2000 still showed 20 percent, and Office 97 had 7 percent.

The survey also showed that 43 percent plan to deploy Office 2007 in the next six months and that 29 percent plan rollouts within the next 12 months.

In addition, 43 percent said those rollouts were tied to upgrades in PC hardware, 32 percent said their rollouts would be broad and enterprise-wide, while 25 percent said they would be project-by-project.

McNabb says the majority of users evaluating a move to Office 2007 also looked at Open Office, and gave a passing glance to Google and its online Google Docs. IBM's Symphony tools also were mentioned.

But McNabb says he doesn't see anything that tells him having a comparable word processor to Microsoft Word would compel users to move off Microsoft.

"It's the lack of a comparable Outlook solution that keeps many of them from even looking," McNabb says.

"Part of the problem in trying to evaluate Office right now is that it is so broad," he says, "But the feedback we got was that even though users looked at alternatives they were not compelled to move."

McNabb says the surprise in the survey was that he expected to see more hesitation in upgrading to Office 2007 and even some users saying they would move small populations of workers to open source or other low-cost alternatives.

"We did not see that," he says. "It's not to say it's not out there, but we did not see it."

McNabb's conclusion is that Microsoft is in a fairly good position.

"Office is no longer Word, PowerPoint, Access, and Excel. There is a wider portfolio on the desktop and server that is drawing a lot of attention," he says.

Microsoft isn't planning to raise its initial unsolicited $44.6 billion bid to buy Yahoo, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Although some have said Microsoft would up the ante for the company, people familiar with the deal told the Journal that it was unlikely to happen. The sources said Microsoft was using the possibility of an increased bid to entice Yahoo to meet to discuss the offer. So far, the companies have only met once.

"There's no reason to bid against ourselves," one of these people told the Journal. Microsoft's bid was initially worth $44.6 billion; however, a decline in Microsoft's shares means the offer is currently about $42 billion.

Yahoo declined to comment on the report. Microsoft could not be reached for comment.

Yahoo rejected Microsoft's offer on Feb. 10, saying it undervalued the company.

According to the Journal's sources, Microsoft believes it can wait because it doubts Yahoo investors were swayed by the company's recent presentation on its three-year financial plan. The sources also said Microsoft doesn't think anything in the presentation would justify a higher price.

Other people told the Journal that Microsoft has no immediate plans to nominate a slate of directors to replace Yahoo's directors.

The Journal also said Yahoo may be amenable to an offer of $40 a share from Microsoft, although others believe it will be in the mid-$30 range.

Although there have been rumors about a deal that would merge Time Warner's AOL Internet business into Yahoo, the sources told the Journal that the mostly likely outcome would be an acquisition by Microsoft, in part, because no company wants to take on the leading software company.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Timothy Keanini, chief technology officer of nCircle, loves Macs -- just not in his company (a maker of network security and compliance management tools).

Keanini has been both a Mac user and a Mac developer during the past five years. Starting in 2001, he brought Macs into his 100-person company, starting with an Apple G4 notebook for himself, because he believed the user-friendly interface and ability to work in a Unix-like environment would help productivity among the engineering team.

So Keanini, who handled IT decisions until the company grew large enough to bring in a director of IT in 2005, encouraged and officially supported nCircle's approximately 40 engineers using MacBooks.

"The rest of our company was Windows, but engineering was mainly Macs because of me," he says.

But ultimately, instead of productivity gains, dealing with compatibility issues between the Macs used by the engineers and the PCs running Windows used by the line-of-business people in the office slowed down work and resulted in communications issues, he says.

So while Apple's sales continue to grow, Keanini decided to buck the trend, and gave up on his most recent Apple machine, an Intel dual-core-based MacBook Pro.

"Between four and six months ago, I switched back to Windows," he says. While Apple's installed base is growing, he left the camp he had once espoused to others. He also now advocates that his company's engineers get Windows machines. Even at his home, Apple's role has changed.

"I am all PC at home and at work now, because frankly if I'm not working, I'm gaming. And the Mac doesn't have games," Keanini says, though his household still has three Apple machines in use by other family members.

What makes an Apple loyalist change camps? Here's a look at five reasons why one tech chief did just that.

1. Productivity trumps religionIt's easy to fall in love with the aluminum cases used in Mac hardware and the slick interface design of the Mac OS X, Keanini says. Those are two reasons why more people are moving to Apple products: Apple announced shipments of its personal computers grew by 44 percent in the first quarter of 2008, beating the 15 percent growth in PC shipments worldwide, according to market researcher IDC.

Yet, depending on how a company uses Macs, trying to integrate the computers into a company's workflow can kill productivity, Keanini says. The applications never quite match up, data has to be massaged to be useful, and the company has to design workarounds for each issue, he says.

"My rule is to find the technology that makes your company most productive and be honest with yourself about it," he says. "Don't bring religion into it."

2. Workarounds waste timeAs soon as a company allows a different operating system onto workers' desks, employees have to start dealing with all the little problems that crop up. Calendar programs no longer sync with the rest of the company and documents created in one office software suite have to be converted to another, usually Microsoft Office. If your company uses Microsoft Exchange, as Keanini's does, this adds another layer of problems.

"Everything is going to be a little bit different, and that little difference in everything eventually adds up," Keanini says.

One company engineer woke up Keanini the night before presentation slides were due for a conference, his voice cracking with stress, because his slides -- exported from Apple's Keynote presentation application to Microsoft PowerPoint -- looked nothing like they had on the Mac.

While such mistakes can be avoided, the work required to keep the company's data working on two platforms eventually saps productivity gains, he says

3. It's hard to abandon favorite toolsYou may become quite attached to a Windows application or two, and decide Apple doesn't have a comparable equivalent. Apple is well known for creating user-friendly applications, but for Keanini, Microsoft has a lead with at least one program: OneNote, which he uses for personal information management.

The application, originally created for Microsoft's tablet PC platform, allows the user to bring all sorts of data into a single notebook format. Also, OneNote does not have a save dialog box, Keanini says. Microsoft recognizes that, if a user enters data into their computer, they are going to want to save it.

Keanini finds himself using OneNote as an organizational hub for his day.

"It integrates so well from Office," Keanini says. "I can send mail from it, I can do To-Dos from it. Bottom line, does it make me more productive? Yes."

4. The Hotel California factor"The designers of Mac -- again, this is their priesthood -- are not thinking about letting their users go," Keanini says. "It's like Hotel California: They are not expecting you to leave."

Companies that move over to the Mac OS X should expect to spend a lot of time converting data if they decide to move back to Windows, Keanini says.

The CTO says that moving all his data back to the Windows platform took more than week. Among the problems: Contacts and appointments exported from the Mac's applications had to cleaned up, he says. Also, there's no simple way to get e-mail out of the Apple Mail application, he says.

"Today, companies need to be thinking about interoperability," he says. "It's the users' data, not the vendor's data."

5. You may feel the heat, literallyAluminum cases make MacBook Pro laptops, like the one Keanini chose, very sleek. But, Keanini says, the focus on design overlooked the fact that the computers throw off a lot of heat -- so much so that he found that he could not use the computer on his lap.

"The religion made me blind," he says. "I was bringing it [the MacBook] on business, but leaving it in the hotel room."

Moreover, the heat causes another problem, he says: The computers' lithium-ion batteries tend to have a shorter lifespan when they run hot. Having to replace the batteries on the laptops more often hit the IT budget bottom line, he says.

Now, the executive runs a Lenovo ThinkPad. "It's a monster, but it runs cool and it's very fast," he says.

CIO is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Responding to increasing pressure from other mobile phone platforms, Microsoft on Tuesday planned to introduce updated versions of Windows Mobile and Internet Explorer Mobile and also make its new enterprise device management software available to all medium-size and large businesses.

The updated IE Mobile browser will support Adobe Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight so that Windows Mobile users will be able to view multimedia Internet applications in their browsers. Microsoft had previously announced that it would support Flash and Silverlight in Windows Mobile but had declined to say when the capabilities would become available.

[ See related review: Microsoft Silverlight rivals Flash, AJAX ]

The new IE Mobile will be available to mobile phone makers in the third quarter, with phones using the browser hitting the market by the end of the year, Microsoft said.

The browser update could help Microsoft to compete better with Apple's iPhone, which includes a browser that users have responded to enthusiastically. Owners of phones that support rich browsing, like the iPhone, view more Web pages on phones than those with less capable browsers, according to research done by Julie Ask, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Microsoft planned to introduce the browser at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas. It also introduced an updated version of Windows Mobile, version 6.1. The update includes a new zoom capability that lets users view an entire Web page or picture and zoom in up on a portion of a page.

It also features a new Getting Started Center aimed at making it easier to set up e-mail, Bluetooth peripherals and Wi-Fi on the phones. New notifications on the home page of the phone of missed calls, upcoming appointments and new messages will allow users to see such updated information at a glance, Microsoft said.

Phones running Windows Mobile 6.1 could become available to end users as early as the second quarter, Microsoft said.

Windows Mobile 6.1 will also support System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, which is now available for any business. Microsoft introduced Mobile Device Manager 2008 in October last year but at the time it was available only to a limited number of testers.

Mobile Device Manager is server software that enterprises can use to remotely manage and secure Windows Mobile phones much the same way that they may do for laptops.

Microsoft also planned to announce the Microsoft Mobile Services Plan, an offering from mobile operators for enterprises that includes mobile management services. Microsoft expected to announce operators that will offer the plan on Tuesday.

In addition to the new software products, Microsoft also planned to introduce some new mobile search features at CTIA. Starting in the next few months, users will be able to download a new version of Live Search for Windows Mobile. The updated software will let users quickly view the address of a contact in their address book on a map and get directions to the location. Users will also be able to do a Web search directly from the software client.

Microsoft also expects to soon begin offering a new version of Live Search for BlackBerry that lets users speak voice commands in order to search for businesses and restaurants and get turn by turn driving directions. Results are displayed on a map.

Screen shots of some of the new capabilities are expected to appear on a Windows Live blog on Tuesday.

In an environment where anti-virus providers are openly admitting that their products cannot stop many attacks and in which customers are under more pressure than ever before to keep their sensitive data protected, Fortify is touting a new process dubbed business software assurance that it maintains will change the manner in which organizations defend themselves from external threats.

While many companies are using products like Fortify's software vulnerability scanning tools to block the channels most frequently being used by outside attackers, such processes will soon evolve from sporadic exercises into a continuous routine aimed at staving off any and all applications-level threats, company officials said.

From the time that applications are written until they are up-and-running in production, companies will use a plethora of technologies, from Fortify's static code analysis scanners to black box testing tools and penetration testing systems, to secure their code, officials with the vendor maintain.

In that sense, applications security is maturing from a mere testing market into a larger, more continuous process, said Roger Thornton, chief technology officer at Fortify.

"When people think about applications security today, they think of these various types of tests, but what they are realizing today is that they need to be doing this work in a risk management framework, in a more repeatable manner," Thornton said. "Companies cannot keep addressing this process from the standpoint of looking at individual point products -- they need to approach it from the perspective of business software assurance."

Leery of having the idea pigeonholed as mere vendor marketing, Thornton said that an ecosystem of providers will drive business software assurance, or BSA, including companies whose tools are used by developers as software code is being written, such as its own, through to the so-called black box testing technologies used to test live applications.

Fortify sells a bundle of static code analysis tools and more "dynamic" scanning technologies for use by software quality assurance testers, along with some real-time applications monitoring capabilities for use after programs go live.

With attacks having moved to the applications-level in dramatic fashion over the last several years, and new compliance regulations holding companies more responsible for vulnerabilities in their systems, the need to adopt risk management throughout the development lifecycle is rapidly being brought into focus, Thornton contends.

"If you have the right risk management approach within the development process, you can go a lot further toward making applications impervious toward attacks," he said. "We're in the nascent stages of this whole idea of software assurance, but we believe that this is how customers, developers, and government agencies are going to begin looking at this problem, even as soon as over the next six months."

As part of the BSA process, organizations will require that business partners and even their customers are doing their own due diligence in keeping vulnerabilities out of their applications, according to Fortify's espoused vision.

It's no coincidence that the company announced its backing of the BSA concept simultaneous to the release of its new Fortify 360 product line, which is more expansive than the company's previous products in terms of its reach across various stages of applications development.

However, the product was tailored to reflect emerging demands from the firm's customers, some of whom are already mature enough in their development operations to embrace the BSA process, Fortify executives said.

Officials with at least one of the company's customers, online stock trading provider Scottrade, said that they are moving in the direction of BSA, even if they have yet to adopt that nomenclature for their work.

Scottrade and its rivals, including eTrade and other online stock sites, have been among those businesses who have publicly announced significant financial write-offs driven by applications-level attacks on their trading systems.

The key idea is approaching applications security as a process, rather than on a more piecemeal basis, as has been common practice for many firms up until now, said Grant Bourzikas, director of information security at Scottrade.

"To really address the security problem, you have to fix your code; intrusion prevention, Web applications firewalls, and a lot of other security technologies don't address the root cause, which is poor code left vulnerable that forces people to write signatures to protect at the network the level," Bourzikas said. "Of course we use all those products, and we have a traditional layered security approach, but by better securing our code and having this two-pronged effect, we can protect ourselves and our customers a lot better."

Whether or not the market will wrap its arms around the phrase business software assurance or merely view the process as part of a common SDLC (secure development lifecycle) program, the notion of continuous code and applications scanning is one that will continue to catch on with more companies, the executive said.

Yet, as important as any technology is the cultural change that must be affected among developers if the strategy is to succeed, said Bourzikas.

"Tools like this can help with SDLC, but you also have to consider the awareness issue," he said. "People have to better understand all the risks, because no one goes out and tries to write code that is insecure by default, they've been told to write something that works and they meet those requirements. We're hoping to teach our developers on what they need to protect, so in that sense, education is every bit as important."

Members of the Norwegian technical committee that voted to ratify Microsoft's OOXML document format as an ISO standard are protesting that decision even before the full results of the standards body's vote on the technology have been announced.

Some members of the Norwegian committee that participated in the ISO's Office Open XML vote are calling on Norway's Ministry of Trade and Industry to suspend the country's "yes" vote pending an investigation, according to a letter to the ISO from the Norwegian committee's chairman.

"You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot," Steve Pepper, chairman of the SN/K185 committee that voted on OOXML for Norway, said in the letter. "This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee. I hereby request that the Norwegian decision be suspended pending the results of this investigation."

Pepper cited "serious irregularities" in connection with the vote, although he did not provide details in his letter.

The letter was posted on a blog by Geir Isene, a member of the Norwegian technical committee and the owner of FreeCode International in Oslo.

Isene said that 80 percent of the SN/K 185 committee was against Norway changing its original vote of "No, with comments," cast in September, to a "Yes" vote. However, "the administrative staff of Standard Norge (the Norwegian Standards Institute) retreated to a room after the meeting [about OOXML] and decided Norway's vote -- effectively steamrolling a roomful of experts," Isene said via e-mail.

He said he has been "one of the most active in speaking out against this farce." Isene joined Norway's technical committee about a year ago, he said.

The OOXML standards process has been dogged by reports that Microsoft put representatives who shared its interests on countries' voting committees so that the standard would pass muster with the ISO. Critics of the specification, which many believe will be passed when the official ISO vote comes out Wednesday, said it's extremely difficult or even impossible to implement in practice, and that many of the problems that various technical committees had with OOXML were not resolved at a Ballot Resolution Meeting last month.

Norway's protest likely means that the debate over OOXML won't end when the ISO announces the results of the final vote.

"Things are getting weirder and weirder," said Andrew Updegrove, a supporter of ODF, a rival to OOXML, and an open-source and open-standards attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston. "I think OOXML is going to be in the news for a while."