ODF 1.1 support now native in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2

You may remember that a little under a year ago Microsoft talked about a commitment we were making to support ODF 1.1 in Service Pack 2 for Office 2007.

Since then the subject has come up from time to time as we have discussed the details of this commitment, initially with some discussion around what we described as our guiding principles for implementation of the file format, then at the various Document Interoperability Workshops that we have been running around the world, and then most recently when we released the detailed implementation notes for the work that we have been doing with the ODF file format.

Earlier this week it all finally went live, with full support for ODF 1.1 in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Doug Mahugh has an excellent post where he talks about how to work with ODF in the Office applications, from minor points such as switching style sheets through to offering users the option to select ODF as their default file format.

If you’re looking for more information on Service Pack 2 (there is a lot more in there than just ODF support) then Gray Knowton has outlined a number of other features of the SP, along with the many KB articles that are encapsulated within it.

The final blog post from Microsoft that is worth a look (I’m sure there are others!) comes from Stephen Peront and discusses the new Converter API that is now supported by the Office applications. This API gives developers the ability to build their own custom file format filters for Office, a feature that I think will open up many new options for our users over time.

Over the last year I’ve been involved in several external and internal discussions that have brought us to this point, and I have to say that I am really proud of how far the Office team have come with this and some of the standards (little “s”, non-technical) that they have laid down for themselves and the wider industry along the way.

Building a conformant implementation of ODF1.1 into Office is only one step, the work that has been done to document the implementation notes for this work, build community around the work that is taking place in this space in the form of the DII events and stand up a robust internal team to manage our standards work that relates to the Office applications lay some great foundations for future versions of the product.

Finally I am going to suggest something that I don’t think I ever have before on this blog, nor did I ever think I would, and that is to read through a /. discussion on this topic that took place over the weekend. The discussion appears to have moved on a long way from two years ago when the answer was “if it is open source, and a published open standard then it will just work”. Of course you will still find the traditional Microsoft jibes that you would expect on /., but there is also some discussion around the merit of implementations, some praise for the work that we have done here and some concrete suggestions for work that now needs to be done by other parties to further the overall interoperability agenda.

I’ve talked before about how achieving interoperability is not going to be about just Open Standards, but also about product design, about community and about sharing of information – the goal of achieving interoperability between office suites will need all four of those activities, we need participation and collaboration in all four areas by a diverse array of parties.