by Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld

Companies have completed the first phase of a Microsoft Corp.-sponsored project to convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications file formats. According to the Microsoft announcement, "OpenXML Translator (ODF Add-in for Word) Release 1.0 supports the current industry-standard document formats of both Open XML and ODF. It has been tested on Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP and has been localized into Dutch, French, German and Polish. In addition, Novell has announced that the Translator will be natively implemented in its next version of OpenOffice. The completed Open XML Translator enables conversion of documents from one format to the other and is available for anyone to download and use at no cost. When plugged into Microsoft Office Word, for example, the Translator provides customers with the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format. The Translator may also be plugged into competing word processing programs that use ODF as the default format to open and save documents in Open XML. Microsoft Corp. announced its support for the open source project to build a technical bridge between Open XML and ODF in July 2006 to provide interoperability between formats. Since inception, it has remained among the 30 most active projects on SourceForge.net and has been downloaded more than 50,000 times." Microsoft funded the work on the translator but did not contribute any code to the project, according to Jason Matusow, senior director of intellectual property and interoperability at Microsoft. The company provided architectural guidance and management to the project. A French company called CleverAge contributed the code and built most of the Open XML Translator, while Aztecsoft Ltd. in India and Dialogika in Germany did the quality assurance and testing.