Fresh on the heels of tying up with Microsoft on better interoperability, Novell has just announced that the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format of Microsoft Office.

Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.

Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result end users will be able to easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.

Commenting on the announcement, Nat Friedman, Novell chief technology and strategy officer for Open Source said, "Novell supports the OpenDocument format as the default file format in OpenOffice.org because it provides customer choice and flexibility, but interoperability with Microsoft Office has also been critical to the success of OpenOffice.org."

Speaking further he said, "OpenOffice.org is very important to Novell, and as our customers deploy Linux desktops across their organizations, they're telling us that sharing documents between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office is a must-have. The addition of Open XML support reflects Novell's commitment to providing enterprise customers the tools they need to be successful, from the desktop to the data center."

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 originated by Microsoft and standardized by the Ecma International organization’s technical committee, TC45. The Open XML is the default format for the recently released Microsoft Office 2007and is also available through free updates to past Microsoft Office versions.