Brian Jones, a Microsoft Office program manager, has shared his thoughts on Microsoft’s new program to develop a plugin for Office 2007 which will enable Office to read and write OpenDocument (ODF) files natively. This is great news for software users everywhere. It significantly levels the playing field for OpenOffice and other up-and-coming document-centric software. I also like how they’re doing it — Open Source, hosted on SourceForge, and this tidbit:
Another cool piece of this is that it will also work in older versions of Office. This is because the tools leverage the Open XML support, and we’re providing free updates to previous versions of Office that allow them to read and write Open XML. It’s another great benefit of leveraging the Open XML formats for the tool.
Good stuff!
