The software giant, Microsoft announced that the company will work with Chinese government to craft tools for translating documents between the company’s Open XML and China’s home created Uniform Office Format (UOF). The company will support Open Document Format (ODF), the existing ISO standard for office documents.
UOF is another XML based document format, which is popularized by China based RedOffice. RedOffice is the open source suite spun off from the OpenOffice.org and used by more than 100 local government departments.
The company has partnered with Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing Information Technology Institute (BITI), Tsinghua University and LitSoft, part of the Lenovo Group, to work on the project. The resulting tool would be posted on the open source download site, SourceForge, another Microsoft’s assisted work, including several Open XML-ODF translators.
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) will cover the tools for style open source license, so that other developers can also use without paying any charge. The company will display the previews of Open XML-UOF add-ins for Microsoft’s Office 2003 and 2007 in this summer.
Microsoft has already funded an open source project, new beta add-ins or Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007, which opens and saves ODF documents generated by the spreadsheet and presentation applications of OpenOffice.org.
Jean Paoli, Microsoft’s general manager of interoperability and XML architecture said,
Our customers have told us their data needs can’t be addressed by a one-format or one-standard-fits-all approach.
Image Credit: 2 Robots & Agileware
Via: Blog Wired
