by , 12:05 PM EST, December 5th, 2007

Adobe's PDF 1.7 format passed the ISO approval process on Tuesday to become the new electronic document standard. PDF 1.7, now also known as ISO 32000 Standard (DIS), will be openly available to companies and organizations that want to include PDF technology in their products and document management systems.

Adobe's James King noted that the PDF, or Portable Document Format, specification passed the ISO approval process with a 13-to-1 vote. PDF 1.7 needed at least 66.6 percent of the votes to be positive, and easily beat the requirement with 93 percent.

The PDF 1.7 standard was originally presented to the ISO standard early in 2007. At that time, Adobe's senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch commented "By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness. As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years."

The approval vote will likely strike a heavy blow to Microsoft's efforts to push its own proprietary electronic document efforts. For companies and governments worldwide, however, the approval opens the door for easy way to assure that documents are accessible on the majority of computer platforms regardless of the country or application the document was created in.