Applications Management Engineer Sr (NYC) Next Step Systems US-NY-New York Post A Job | Post A Resume

Linspire, Inc., developer of the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems, today announced the immediate availability of the Open XML Translator within their latest released Freespire and Linspire products. Adding another interoperability tool to their core operating systems, the Open XML Translator enables bi-directional compatibility so that files saved in Open XML can be opened by OpenOffice users, and files created by OpenOffice to be saved in Open XML format.

Last month, Linspire announced it had joined ongoing efforts to help create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between ODF and Open XML.The result of these efforts are to improve the ability of OpenOffice.org users to work with the Office Open XML format by increasing the interoperability between ODF and Open XML formats. As a result, end users of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org will now be able to more easily share files, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas, and style templates across the two office productivity suites.

"Interoperability within the PC ecosystem is extremely important for Linux to find acceptance on the desktop," said Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire. "The ability to easily share document files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice users is vital to our users and Linspire is pleased to now offer this enhanced capability."

The Open XML format is an open standard file format for office applications that can be freely implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. The Open XML format was standardized by Ecma International on December 7, 2006 and is also being implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. It is now under consideration for ratification by ISO/IEC JTC1. Open XML is the default format for the recently released Microsoft Office 2007. The Open XML format is also available through free updates to past Microsoft Office versions.

"This is good news for our customers. Linspire and Microsoft are enabling our customers to use technology that best meets the needs of their business by providing tools that make it easier to exchange documents between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice thanks to XML," said Jean Paoli, general manager for Interoperability and XML Architecture at Microsoft. "As mixed system environments become more common, our commitment to delivering interoperability by design makes our ongoing collaboration with commercial open source companies like Linspire so beneficial to our customers."

With an estimated 100 million users, OpenOffice.org is a full-featured, open source office productivity suite with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications. OpenOffice.org currently supports the OpenDocument (ODF) file format, which is an ISO-standardized, XML-based file format specification for office applications maintained by the open source community. The OpenDocument format ensures information saved in spreadsheets, documents and presentations is freely accessible to any OpenDocument-supporting application. OpenOffice.org is available free of charge at http://www.openoffice.org. The open source Open XML/ODF Translator project can be viewed at this internet location: http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter.

Related Stories:
TurboLinux Joins Microsoft's Push for XML-ODF(Jul 10, 2007)
Linspire Backs Microsoft's Open XML(Jul 02, 2007)
There They Go Again: It's Time to Just Say No to Microsoft and Ecma(Jun 30, 2007)
InfoWorld: Open XML Translator for Word Available(Feb 04, 2007)