Novell Announces Support for Microsoft’s Office Open XML Format

Novell has announced that it will support Microsoft’s Office Open XML format in its OpenOffice.org suite. This will improve interoperability between Novell’s OpenOffice and Microsoft’s Office 2007. Novell has said that it will create bidirectional open-source translators, which will be offered as plug-ins, for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. They will begin with the word processing translator, which should be released in late January 2007.

If you recall, Microsoft and Novell didn’t want anything to do with any interoperability between their products. Finally, they both realized that for their customers’ sake they better start offering software and services that allow their products to co-exist. This is just another step in that direction.

OpenOffice.org supposedly has about 100 million users and it supports the XML-based OpenDocument Format (ODF) available as part of Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Open Workgroup Suite offerings.