The Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin today announced a new DIN working group that will be focused on document translation to support interoperability! The working group is open and has issued an invitation for participation. The output of this group will be focused on providing a pragmatic approach to translate between document formats, allowing customers to have choice in their format selection.

To quote Gerd Schürman (head of the eGovernment unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS):

"Today there's no longer any reason why we should have to make a straight choice between the two standards," he said, "Instead of either/or, we're enabling interoperability between various document standards"

 

This is great news for governments and enterprises around the world who are seeking choice and improved interoperability between the ODF and Office Open XML (Ecma 376) document format standards.