The Redmond Company has announced the birth of a project designed to create an Open XML Translator. The project was somewhat forced down Microsoft's throat by governmental representatives both from the US and from abroad, and the software giant gave in and will consequently sponsor an open source project initiative that will materialize in tools able to provide conversion between its Open XML format in Office 2007 and OpenDocument (ODF). The Redmond Company has also announced that the future Office suite will also offer the possibility to integrate an add-in for saving directly to ODF format.

Microsoft partners are already on the way to create OpenDocument tools, involved in the project are the French company Clever Age alongside independent software vendors Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany.

The Web site SourceForge.net will host the Open XML Translator initiative that will be available under BSD open source license. This week Microsoft will put forward a beta of the Open XML Translator for Word 2007 that has the options to convert .docx Word documents to .odf and the other way around. The final product will ship by the end of this year, but just for Word 2007. The converters for Excel and PowerPoint are set to be released next year.

"We believe that Open XML meets the needs of millions of organizations for a new approach to file formats, so we are sharing it with the industry by submitting it, with others, to become a worldwide standard," said Microsoft XML architect Jean Paoli. "Yet it is very important that customers have the freedom to choose from a range of technologies to meet their diverse needs."