Microsoft Embraces ODF, PDF and XPS

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Microsoft announced that it will introduce support for Open Document Format, Portable Document Format and XML Paper Specification in Office 2007 SP2, due for release in 2009. This is another step by Microsoft to support Open Source while at the same time hopefully keeping their critics quiet. As I've said before I now expect other Office vendors such as IBM and Sun will now embrace OOXML. While I don't care about ODF support it is a great addition for education where students can use Office 2007 in school and know that they can work on their coursework at home on their Open Source Office suite without formating difficulties. The ability to open and save PDF's is much more useful to me and lets remember that Microsoft had intended to support PDF in Office 2007 until Adobe forced them to pull support in 2006, not really thinking about users there Adobe were ya? I assume Office for Mac will also get support for these formats at some point in the near future also.

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for
20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

When using SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and
save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.

BECTA and OOXML

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A week or so ago BECTA referred it's interoperability complaint against Microsoft to the EU Commission. The EU is taking the this referral and adding it to the evidence pile against Microsoft. I do wonder though how much the Interoperability complaint is actually Microsoft's problem. If Office 2007 is able to open Open Office documents and save to the same format then surely it passes interoperability with the Open Office suite. I get the impression from what I've read however that Microsoft is being held accountable for other office suites not being able to open OOXML documents. This is surely a complaint against the other vendors and not against Microsoft. If the documentation on OOXML is available then there shouldn't be a problem. This just seems to be BECTA jumping on the EU Commission bandwagon.

When I asked BECTA whether the complaint against Microsoft should actually be directed at the other vendors now that OOXML is an ISO standard format they replied:

The extent to which OOXML is sufficiently open to allow effective competiton is one of the issues that are the subject of ongoing investigation by the European Commission.

Once the results of the Commission´s deliberations are known we will, if necessary, update our advice on OOXML.

Let's hope the EU makes the right decision this time and forces the other vendors to catch up to the high standard of the Microsoft Office suite rather than trying to drag office down to their level.