In a move that could have significant impact on the future of its Office line of products, Microsoft Corp agreed to make Microsoft Office and the Open Document Format (ODF) interoperable. This decision could give Redmond and good foothold currently, since many governments are mulling shifting to the ODF.
The Belgian government became the first to start this process of moving to ODF last month. The Massachusetts government is also on the road to making a similar shift. In such a scenario, Microsoft really had no choice, but to bow to the pressure and demands of the market. It announced the introduction of the Open XML Translator project through which Microsoft Office Open XML formats and ODF will be interconnected.
"The translation tools will be broadly available to the industry for use with other individual or commercial projects to accelerate document interoperability and expand customer choice between Open XML and other technologies," Microsoft said in a statement. But even in announcing that it was giving a nod to interoperablity, Microsoft stressed its products were better than the open-source ones.
"ODF focuses on more limited requirements, is architected very differently and is now under review in OASIS subcommittees to fill key gaps such as spreadsheet formulas, macro support and support for accessibility options," Microsoft stressed. "Certain compromises and customer disclosures will be a necessary part of translating between the two formats."
The project for translator tools is under way and French IT solution provider Clever Age is collaborating with Redmond as are Aztecsoft from India and Dialogika from Germany. A preliminary tool for MS Word 2007 can be accessed at http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter.
The complete tools are expected to be available by the end of the year.
