Microsoft will bridge Open XML and ODF in 2007 Office System
Remember my last post about ODF?
Things go quite fast in our industry. Indeed, Microsoft has decided to enable the support for ODF format both for reading and writing documents.
- Microsoft is funding and providing architectural guidance to three partners to build the Open XML Translator, a set of tools being developed as open source, on SourceForge, under a BSD license, to enable translation of Office Open XML and ODF documents.
- This will provide read and “save as” functionality of ODF in Office.
- Down-level Office capability is offered through the Office Compatibility Packs which give older versions of Office the ability to use Open XML.
- Microsoft is also announcing the creation of an Interoperability Center for Office 2007 – an add-in that adds itself to the file menu in Office 2007 where users can get .PDF, .XLS, and .ODF interoperability.
- Microsoft is doing the Open XML to ODF translator to be responsive to its government customers – especially those where they need to communicate with constituents who are using ODF.
I can, somehow, underdand that but, to be honnest, I'm not seeing any strong demand for ODF from Corporate or Consumer segments.
Some links of interest:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ODF-converter - SourceForge project site. We migh have to wait for a couple of days before the site is updated.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brianjones - Brian runs an excellent blog on Open XML issues
http://www.microsoft.com/interop - Where to find an open letter from Chris Capossela with good information on the differences between Open XML and ODF.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow - Jason's blog is only somewhat about ODF - his posts are on interop, standards, open source
http://ntouk.com/?view=archives&month=5&year=2006 – Jerry Fishenden, Microsoft National Technology Officer for the UK. Good posting on doc format issues. He also comments on the issue elsewhere in his blog.
http://notes2self.net/archive/2006/06/26/415.aspx - Stephen McGibbon, Microsoft Regional Technology Officer for Western Europe. Also a link to a single blog, but there are other postings on the topic.
http://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/archive/2006/06/23/getstartedwithOpenXMLFileFormats.aspx - more technical blog from Erika Ehrli – From the Information Worker team.
