The newest version of our ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office is available, you can find it here. We have fixed the installation problem that occurred on some systems, and have made many improvements to the filters.

The biggest difference compared to 1.0 is that we have support for different languages now!

From Peter Vandenabeele, who delivered an excellent keynote address for the first ODF Interop Camp, in Barcelona, September 20, 2007:

"ODF Camp was held parallel to the OpenOffice.org 2007 conference in Barcelona on 20 September 2007 with about 30 participants.

Interoperability of ODF documents was tested with documents generated in StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, IBM Symphony, Google Docs, KOffice, MS Office 2003 + Sun plug-in, MS Office 2003 + odf-converter and SEPT-solutions Mobile Office.

IBM recently made a new version of its Lotus Symphony collaboration software available for free. Why are you taking on the challenge of gaining market share from Microsoft Office? Why is that strategically important to IBM?

New Accessibility Tools Framework Project at Eclipse.org

Accessibility experts from the OASIS ODF Accessibility Sub Committee have established an approved project at Eclipse.org to develop an 'Accessibility Tools Framework'. This new open source project will be established by a significant code contribution from IBM. For example, an accessibility evaluation tool for ODF documents will be open sourced. This follows IBM's contribution of the iAccessible2 API to the Free Standards Group, now part of the new Linux Foundation.