Developers of an open source project to produce a
translator between the Opendocument format (ODF) and Microsoft’s
Open XML document format have introduced the first completed
version of the tool.
The Microsoft-funded translator project is being developed by
French company Cleverage and Sonata Software of India, and tested
by Dialogika of Germany and India-based Aztecsoft.
The project is a major initiative by Microsoft to convince
users, particularly in the public sector, that it is not interested
in locking them into proprietary data formats built around its own
products.
Governments such as India are now working towards adopting the
open-source ODF format, and others are following suit.
When plugged into Microsoft Office Word, for example, the
Translator provides users with the choice to open and save
documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format.
The Translator may also be plugged into competing word
processing programs that use ODF as the default format to open and
save documents in Open XML.
Microsoft announced its support for the open source project to
build a technical bridge between Open XML and ODF in July 2006, to
provide interoperability between formats.
Since inception, it has remained among the 30 most active
projects on Sourceforge.net and has been downloaded more than
50,000 times, said Microsoft.
Microsoft said that this project, the standardisation of Open
XML within Ecma International, and the ongoing standardisation of
Open XML in the International Organisation for Standardisation and
the International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC), help
ensure that customers have a choice in what formats they choose to
store their data in.
Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and
standards at Microsoft, said, “The translator project has been
built to be independent of any one application, and has proved to
be useful for both Microsoft and our competitors in solving an
interoperability challenge for customers.”
Novell plans to implement the Translator in the next version of
the Openoffice.org productivity suite.
The second phase of the translator project, including
translators for spreadsheets and presentation software will begin
this month.
The project will continue to be open source, developed on
Sourceforge.net at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter
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