The translator is the first finished product delivered following Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell’s November interoperability and collaboration agreement with Microsoft, and will enable Novell’s version of OpenOffice.org to open and save word processing documents in Microsoft’s Office Open XML format.
Novell announced in December that it had joined the Microsoft-backed open source project that has also created a translator that enables Microsoft’s Office to read and write to ODF, which is OpenOffice.org’s default format and was approved as an ISO standard last year.
The Open XML Translator project was created in July 2006 in response to growing adoption of ODF. While Microsoft is not directly involved in the project, it drafted in partners such as third-party vendors, with French software firm CleverAge, Indian testing firm Aztecsoft, and Germany’s Dialogika, to avoid any suggestions that it was manipulating the formats to its own advantage.
Novell is continuing to cooperate with the project to create translators for Excel, PowerPoint, and ODF-compliant alternatives, while Microsoft’s attempts to have Open XML approved as an ISO standard continues.
