Welcome to the Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 Office Open XML (ECMA-376 1^st Edition) Implementer Notes Site. Here you will find detailed information about Office’s support for the ECMA-376 specification.  These notes will help ECMA-376 implementers interoperate with Office by explaining, among other things, Office’s support for optional features, range restrictions for attribute values, and how Office’s functionality maps to Open XML constructs.  If you have specific questions about the content of any of the implementer notes, click the Forum button and follow the instructions to sign in and post your question.

Welcome to the Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 Open Document Format (ODF) implementer notes site. Here you will find detailed information about Office’s support for each section of the OASIS ODF 1.1 specification. These notes will help promote interoperability by providing details that others can use as reference points for their own applications. For example, they include information about which attributes and elements are supported, as well as details about how Office functionality maps to specific constructs in the ODF specification. For a higher-level overview of Microsoft’s general approach to ODF implementation, see Guiding Principles for Office’s ODF Implementation. If you have specific questions about Office’s ODF implementation, or if you need further information about the notes themselves, please post questions to the MSDN interoperability forum.

A critical challenge for the IT industry is to realize the seamless flow of information across heterogeneous environments with no data loss, whether between customers and vendors in a supply chain, across specialized vertical applications, or just among productivity applications. Thus, enabling customers to access data -- such as document content or phone book information -- in a form that permits its use in other software products is a benefit that all software developers are now challenged to deliver.

Industry Collaboration to Create Solutions: Document Interoperability Initiative
While significant progress has been made in document interoperability with the adoption of multiple open standards and supporting translation tools, there is still much work to be done. To solve the industry's pressing interoperability problems, leaders must collaborate to identify and overcome interoperability barriers. The Document Interoperability Initiative is, a global program of technical vendor discussions, labs and solution enablement programs to develop solutions for effective data exchange between product implementations of document format standards. This initiative is open to any vendor who wants to collaborate with the community to create these solutions identify and address interoperability issues between different implementations of document formats. They are encouraged to propose meetings, raise issues, and help set the agenda for the effort. Users of information technologies are also encouraged to participate to help prioritize and focus the efforts of vendors. The Document Interoperability Initiative is community based and open to all participants wanting to promote document format interoperability for the benefit of the user community.

The Document Interoperability Initiative goals include: