Microsoft Reverses Course, Opens Office to ODF

Published: May 28, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Bowing to pressure from European customers and regulators intent on utilizing Open Document Format (ODF), Microsoft last week announced it will include native support for ODF within Office, after all. The change comes as a departure from Microsoft's previous strategy, which required people to use separate translation tools if they wanted to open or save an ODF document. In addition to ODF, next year's Office 2007 update will support the XPS and PDF formats, as well.

Microsoft says it will deliver native support for ODF version 1.1 within Office 2007 with the delivery of Office 2007 service pack 2 (SP2) during the first half of 2009. The change will enable Office users to set ODF as the default file format, which is something that many groups, notably the ODF Alliance, have asked for. Recently, another group, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), asked the European Commission to use its legal authority to force Microsoft to support ODF in Office. Now, the EC won't have to.

The move elicited cautious optimism by the ODF Alliance. "Clearly this announcement reflects the strong demand from customers worldwide, especially governments, for access to ODF, a truly universal, open standards-based file format," says Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance. "However, until Microsoft enables Office users to create and save in ODF by default as easily and fully as in Microsoft's own formats, governments will continue to adopt a 'buyer beware' attitude. Because Microsoft has a history of broken promises, no one should celebrate this news until we see what is actually done and how quickly it is put in place."

When it ships, Office 2007 SP2 will also allow users to save and open documents based on Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) version 1.5 and Microsoft's XML Paper Specification (XPS), Microsoft says. PDF and XPS are similar document formats, in that they were both designed to make it easy to create and share documents with high quality graphics that are rendered consistently across different platforms and applications, most notably over the Web. XPS has sometimes been called Microsoft's "PDF killer," and was introduced several years ago.

The Office update will also bring support for Uniform Office Format (UOF), the national document file format standard used in China, Microsoft says.

Microsoft will join the technical committee at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) overseeing the next version of ODF, and will join a working group at the Interational Organization for Standardization (ISO) that's working on ODF maintenance. The company will also be an active participant in the ongoing standardization and maintenance activities for XPS and PDF, it says.

Chris Capossela, senior vice president for the Microsoft Business Division, said the move demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to giving users choice. "By increasing the openness of our products and participating actively in the development and maintenance of document format standards, we believe we can help create opportunities for developers and competitors, including members of the open source communities, to innovate and deliver new value for customers."

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