ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

You asked for it. And now it's official. Today sees the announcement of yet more interoperability support in Microsoft Office:

"Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will add support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. Support for these standards will be enhanced by the inclusion of ODF 1.0 and 1.1 under the Open Specification Promise.

Microsoft has previously expressed its commitment to supporting the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members (IS 29500). In the next version of Office, codenamed O14, Microsoft will update the already substantial support it provides for IS29500, the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members.

To ensure our products support the ongoing evolution of Open XML and ODF, Microsoft will take an active role in the development of both Open XML and ODF formats and in the SC34 working group designed to improve interoperability between the two, as well announce its intent to join the OASIS Technical Committee for ODF that is currently developing ODF 1.2."

Of course, Office interop with ODF (and other file formats) is already widespread through software such as the translators long available on Sourceforge.

And Open XML is widely pervasive already, across multiple operating systems and applications (I tried to give a snapshot of just how widespread it is in my blog posting here).

And the other key point to note about Office 2007 SP2 of course is that it will have new open APIs for developers to use to plug-in other document formats - enabling them to show up in the drop-down menu so they can be selected as the default formats by users.

I know file formats are not a topic that everyone gets excited about - but some people do. So I think it's a positive move to ensure that users can choose whatever formats they need to use for whatever purpose they want. Interop is good, choice is good. And this is a good development. I'm sure we'll be seeing more .... watch this space.

Technorati tags: XML standards ISO Open XML ODF interoperability Microsoft technology policy