“Sun announced today that it would make a “preview” version of
its Office to ODF plugin in ‘mid February,’ with the full version
to follow ‘later this spring.’ Plugins will be available for use
with both Sun’s StarOffice as well as the open source
OpenOffice.org office suite. The announcement comes five days after
Microsoft announced the immediate availability of its Office to ODF
plugin at SourceForge.“At this time, neither plugin will work with all versions of
Office. According to the press release issued by Sun just now (the
full text appears below), the Sun plugin will only work with Office
2003 text documents, while the Microsoft plugin will only assist
users that upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007, as it is based upon
the OOXML formats. Initially, that means that most Office users
will be able to use the Sun plugin, but not the Microsoft-sponsored
alternative…”