From the brief reading I did a few months ago, I think MS have a number of business applications which they hope to use the OOXML file
Interesting news. Given the OOXML process, I suspect the European Union is putting a fair amount of pressure on MS. In years gone by, MS said there was no demand for standard document structures/formats and that is why they didn't support. The irony of then promoting OOXML but ignoring ODF probably wasn't lost on either MS or the European Union. formats to intergrate email, documents, spreadsheets etc in corporate/government enviroments. Perhaps without the ODF option, MS have difficulty getting these new products accepted into European governments. The service pack is a few months off. I don't know too much about ODF but i imagine it must be rather difficult to write translation software that will work for every conceivable mash of documents users have created over the years. Doing a little reading around latex and docbook helped me realise how little structure applications like Office and OpenOffice impose on the user. How different writing translation software must be for structured documents vs. unstructured documents. I've experimented with Sun's ODF plugin for MS Word and the results have been mixed, some application crashes but others working really well.