Doug Mahugh, senior project manager for Office interoperability at Microsoft, said the goal is to support interoperability among office productivity applications. Microsoft announced its plans to support ODF earlier in 2008, and this documentation represents the software giant's first concrete step toward fostering true interoperability. Mahugh said similarly detailed documentation on Microsoft's implementation of Open XML in Office are forthcoming.

"The goal here is transparency of our implementation," Mahugh said in an interview with eWEEK. "We've committed to do the same for other document formats."

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