Novell and Microsoft Make Office Suites Play Nice

December 6th, 2006: Microsoft and Novell put even more planks in the bridge between open source and proprietary software yesterday with the announcement that the two are making Office 2007 and Novell’s version of OpenOffice.org interoperable.

After Corel’s announcement last week that its WordPerfect suite will be supporting OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's OpenXML, the Novell/Microsoft announcement that they are working on interoperability between the suites will no doubt further boost the estimated 100 million users OpenOffice.org already enjoys.

“Novell supports the OpenDocument format as the default file format in OpenOffice.org because it provides customer choice and flexibility, but interoperability with Microsoft Office has also been critical to the success of OpenOffice.org,” said Nat Friedman, Novell chief technology and strategy officer for Open Source. “OpenOffice.org is very important to Novell, and as our customers deploy Linux desktops across their organisations, they're telling us that sharing documents between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office is a must-have.”

Novell says that interoperability will be achieved by developing bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007. It will be working with Microsoft and others to do this, with the word processing translator to be the first available at the end of January 2007.

The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell’s OpenOffice.org, and according to the company end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, maintaining consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.

Novell will release the translator code to the open source community to be freely included in the OpenOffice.org code when it is completed.

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