RSSSun Preps ODF to MS Office Converter
by Nate Mook
Sun Microsystems announced Wednesday that it is preparing to release a plug-in for its StarOffice 8 productivity suite that will provide two-way conversion between the OpenDocument format and Microsoft Office 2003.
The idea of the plug-in is to enable organizations to transition to ODF while continuing to support Microsoft Office users. Although a number of governments including the state of Massachusetts have pushed for ODF adoption due to it being a completely open standard, there has been some resistance due to certain assistive devices being only supported by Office.
The conversion plug-in was developed by the OpenOffice.org community, with the help of Sun developers, the company said. Microsoft recently finished its own plug-in that integrates into Office 2007 and older versions to provide export into ODF, as well as importing files already created in the format. StarOffice is Sun's branded version of OpenOffice, which it sells and supports.
Unlike Microsoft's plug-in, however, Sun has focused on Office 2003 compatibility. Office 2007 utilizes Microsoft's new Office Open XML format, which the Redmond company recently received Ecma certification for and submitted to the International Standards Organization.
Sun's StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview will be available later this month, but only with support for conversion between text documents using .doc and .odt. Support for presentation and spreadsheet files is expected with the final release in April. Sun says the conversion is transparent to the user and memory usage is negligible.
According to Sun, Massachusetts is already using the plug-in to meet its January deadline to begin migrating the Executive Department to ODF.
"This plug-in will simplify and further accelerate implementation of ODF by allowing users to standardize their work flows on ODF, so that they become vendor independent and can choose between multiple implementations and suppliers going forward," commented Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance, a group comprised of 350 members that promotes and advances OpenDocument.
4 Comments
It's just great to see the spin coming out of a large company. ;) Oh yea, the large company isn't Microsoft so everyone will feel that it's ok.
hahahaha, fools!
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"That master of all goofs is stunningly arrogant and silly."
Reading this with just a small shift in emphasis describes MS very aptly! ;-)
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Makes sense, as ODF is vendor and program-neutral, unlike OXML, which requires Microsoft's proprietary software to read. But since the actual OXML spec is not published, there will never be a good converter from it to another format. Doesn't matter, ODF is the future; OXML was built for the past, as even Microsoft admits.
And to top it all off, Microsoft is trying to "standardize" 1900 as a Leap Year within OXML. That master of all goofs is stunningly arrogant and silly.
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Nice FUD attempt zridling.
I don't know where you're getting your information but OpenXML is not tied to any software any more than ODF is tied to Open Office.
Furthermore, if you'd bother reading the news, you'd know that Novel has already announced that Open Office.org will soon support the Office Open XML format natively.
You must be years behind in the news to claim that the Office Open XML spec is not published. I've posted a link to the PDF's on almost every BetaNews article surrounding ODF or Open XML
Here it is again for other morons that don't understand how to use Google: http://www.ecma-internat.../standards/Ecma-376.htm
Had you been more familiar with history, you'd know that the year 1900 leap year problem was actually a Lotus 1-2-3 problem and was added to Excel so that it would be compatible with the then market leader. It was decided to keep this 20 year old "feature" in place since literally hundreds of millions of documents would be broken if it was changed
Thanks for playing dude! Do try to be a little more informed before spouting off next time, mmmmk?
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