14 DAY TRIAL // Sun Microsystems is working on a plug-in designed to deliver seamless two-way conversion between Microsoft Office formats and ODF. Sun revealed that the StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview will become available sometime in mid-February 2007, while the final release will be delivered during this spring.
"Organizations can now consider switching to ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument Format while protecting employees needing assistive devices only supported by legacy Microsoft software," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software at Sun Microsystems. "ODF is important because it ensures documents will still be readable long into the future while allowing a wide choice of proprietary and open source software choices to work with the documents."
Sun explained that the StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview is based on the OpenOffice.org platform and that while in the initial stage, it will deliver conversion support only for text documents; support for spreadsheet and presentation documents will be added in the final version.
Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance welcomed the upcoming release of the Sun plug-in. Since ODF has become an international standard in 2006, its adoption has eroded Microsoft's domination. Recently, the Redmond Company has presented its own version of a format translator. The ODF translator is already available for download, but as yet only supports doc to odt conversions, and vice versa.
"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," Marcich said.