Microsoft made an announcement this week that the Office 2007 Service Pack 2, scheduled for early 2009, will finally provide users with native support for ODF and PDF.
Its own XPS OOXML format (aka “PDF Killer”), which caused so much controversy with ISO committees and users, has anticlimactically been put on the back burner. Native support for XPS will be included within the next version of the Office suite.
As to the PDF, it seems that since Adobe’s PDF is now standardized, Microsoft can include the native support for the format it had initially mapped out for the Office 2007 suite. But while you’ll be able to create PDFs natively, chances are you still won’t have full access to the heavy duty features which stand alone products like Acrobat and Sonic PDF Creator can offer. So, don’t recycle bin those applications just yet.
By going one step further than the export feature for these major formats, Microsoft is finally opening itself up to adopting and adapting to non-Microsoft ways. With integration for different vendor formats, could Microsoft finally be co-operating?
. . . Or, equipped with a wide user-base, a solid application suite and support for open source and final document formats, could they be pulling out all the stops to overtake its biggest competitors?
