Features

Microsoft Surrenders to Document Interoperability

By Sophia Mayengbam

Microsoft has finally given in to the pressure of government to allow interoperability between its MS Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF). The company has announced an open source project dubbed Open XML Translator project that will create tools to build a technical bridge between the MS Office and OpenDocument.

The translator tool yo be made available as free, downloadable add-ins for several older versions of the Microsoft Office system, will be developed and licensed as open source software. 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 is developing the translation tool in collaboration with the France-based IT solution provider Clever Age and several independent software vendors, including Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany. The project will be posted in SourceForge, the open-source software development Web site.

ODF, MS Office competitor, is increasingly becoming popular because it offers the advantage of interoperability, allowing organisations free to switch software. It also offers cost effectiveness and particularly is very important for the sustainability of SMEs. According to Microsoft the move is in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format.

"By enabling this translator, we will make both choice and interoperability a more practical option for our customers," said Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft. "We believe that Open XML meets the needs of millions of organizations for a new approach to file formats, so we are sharing it with the industry by submitting it, with others, to become a worldwide standard. Yet it is very important that customers have the freedom to choose from a range of technologies to meet their diverse needs."

Microsoft said that the Open XML and ODF were designed to meet different customer requirements. The bidirectional translation tools development through an open source project will make the technical decisions tradeoffs transparent to both Open and ODF advocates, Microsoft commented.

Microsoft said that ODF focuses on limited requirements, unlike Open XML formats that are compatible to office customers. It said ODF under review in OASIS subcommittees to fill key gaps such as spreadsheet formulas, macro support and support for accessibility options. As a result, certain compromises and customer disclosures will be a necessary part of translating between the two formats.

Microsoft, which had a rigid stand on the translation of interoperability of its products, has now included built-in support for MS Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint to enable interoperability across products.

"Interoperability is a key priority of the government in the e-governance paradigm. Our ability to meet the needs of citizens will be greatly increased by the interoperability and integration of open, XML-based standards," said M. Moni, deputy director general of the National Informatics Centre, who is spearheading the process of e-government standards in India.

"This tool promises to be a very significant development in the trend towards practical open document standards and, critically, customer-friendly means to move between them. It can only be good for the IT industry’s customers and product and service innovators,” said Andrew Hopkirk, director of the U.K.’s National Computing Centre’s e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) Programme.

Often criticised in the past for not allowing interoperability, Microsoft has now also set up Interoperability Customer Executive Council to identify areas for interoperability improvements across its products and the overall software industry.

"The Interoperability Customer Executive Council will help us prioritize areas where we can achieve greater interoperability through product design, collaboration agreements with other companies, standards, and effective licensing of our intellectual property," Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.

The council, hosted by Muglia, will meet twice a year in Redmond, Washington. The council will have direct contact with Microsoft executives and product teams so it can focus on interoperability issues that are of greatest importance to customers, including connectivity, application integration and data exchange.


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