Microsoft has demonstrated support for the Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standard in a technical preview of the forthcoming Office 15 productivity suite, and plans to release a beta version with the feature late this summer.



From ComputerWorld:

The company announced its support for ODF 1.2 -- the native document format of OpenOffice.org 3 and LibreOffice 3 -- during the ODF Plugfest that it hosted in Brussels last week.

The plugfest, or interoperability test, was organized by the OpenDoc Society, once a bitter rival of Microsoft. The society was set up to promote ODF at a time when Microsoft was pushing for its own document format, OOXML, to become an international standard for office productivity suite document formats. ODF 1.0 had already been adopted as an international standard, ISO/IEC 26300, while a variant of OOXML was later adopted as ISO/IEC 29500.

  Microsoft to support ODF 1.2 open document standard in Office 15