Brian Jones, who runs open file formats for Microsoft Office, has blogged that:
Today we are announcing the creation of the Open XML Translator project that will help translate between the Office Open XML formats and the OpenDocument format. We've talked a lot about the value the Open XML formats bring, and one of them of course is the ability to filter it down into other formats. While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments. We've had some governments request that we help build solutions so that can use ODF for certain situations, so that's why we are creating the Open XML Translator project.
ODF is being requested by the commonwealth of Massachussetts and other government bodies who, quite rightly, want to keep their data in open standard file formats. I've written about this in columns here and here, among others.
Microsoft has been working to support standard formats in Microsoft Office for many years. Support for plain text and rtf (Rich Text Format) are old, but it has added HTML, and Office 2007 beta adds Adobe's PDF and Open XML.
Open XML is Microsoft's format, and very similar to ODF. It is being standardised via ECMA.
Microsoft had been leaving it to ODF supporters to add ODF support to Office 2007, and a group from OpenOffice.org has been working on a plug-in for more than a year. It's not clear why Microsoft has changed its mind, but it has now organised and funded some third parties to do the job. (The schedule shows that Microsoft wants the plug in finished by the end of this year, to meet Massachusset's January deadline, so this may be a factor.)
The third parties are Clever Age (Dev & Project Management - France & Poland), Aztecsoft (End to End functionality testing - India), and DIaLOGIKa (European Institutions scenarios testing - Germany). The project has been launched at SourceForge under a liberal BSD-style open source licence. (Why Clever Age? It was already working on a SourceForge proejct for an OpenOffice filter to Microsoft Word XML.)
One of the more amusing parts of Brian Jones's post is his (entirely justified) little knock at ODF:
One area I'm going to be interested to follow is how to map features that aren't specified in the ODF spec. OpenOffice has actually made the decision to extend the spec in ways that don't actually appear to be allowed (like with numbering formats), and I'm not sure if that's the right way to go. I've seen a lot of problems when moving documents from OpenOffice to KOffice for example, and I'm sure these divergences from the spec don't help out. Is the right thing to extend in the same ways OpenOffice did, or is it best to wait for OASIS to release the next version of the spec and hope that it specifies some of those missing features? Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing, so if you do decide to extend the format like OpenOffice did, what happens when ODF 2.0 comes out and it specifies that feature differently from how OpenOffice did it?
When I was at an Office Reviewers Workshop, Jones told us: "It's really important to us for our files to be really open," and Gray Knowlton said Microsoft had "given up control of file formats". There are some less obvious reasons for this (including server-based processing of Office documents, which requires that the data be separated from the presentation). Either way, Microsoft is basically changing the game, and its competitive strategy is now to be more open than OpenOffice and ODF, as well as better.
Note: Stephen O'Grady of the RedMonk consultancy has a Q&A.
