14 DAY TRIAL // Xandros and Microsoft seem to have taken seriously in consideration their new agreement and started working on some interoperability issues. According to the officials from the two companies, they intend to create and ship open source translators between the Ecma Office Open XML documents and the Open Documents Formats.
Other companies are also welcomed to get involved into this project too. The respective translators would then be available through Xandros Network update facility. The translators are developed through the Open XML/ODF Translator project. Andreas Typaldos, Xandros CEO showed himself very excited with this new idea. He states:
"We are delighted to join forces with Microsoft and others to provide interoperability between standardized XML document formats. The work of the world is done using various document formats as well as operating systems, so it is vital to provide our customers with the means interoperate with ease in this diverse environment."
Xandros provides and supports OpenOffice.org as part of its Xandros Linux Desktop. The Office Open XML format is a file format specification for the storage of electronic documents such as memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. The specification was developed by Microsoft for its Microsoft Office 2007 product suite and was standardized by Ecma International as Ecma 376 in December 2006. The resulting standard enables the building of open source translators, therefore the application and platform developers can now share information without caring about the documents' formats as well as about the computing environments.
Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards with Microsoft says:
"This is good news for customers. Xandros and Microsoft share the view that competing office productivity applications should make it easy for customers to exchange files with one another. Mixed system environments are becoming more common, and we believe in delivering interoperability by design for the benefit of our customers. Our ongoing collaborative relationships with commercial open source companies like Xandros help us achieve that goal."