Yesterday I wrote about the contradictions in Microsoft’s Office Open XML, and questioned whether the world needs two standards (especially when one — Microsoft’s — is so flawed).

Later in the day, Sam Hiser posted two entries to the OpenDocument Foundation’s blog, about an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. Rumors about this plugin have been around for months, but details have been lacking.

Running on ODF Inside of MS Office, subtitled “Perfect Conversion Fidelity & The daVinci ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office” states that “… Microsoft’s Ecma-approved Office Open XML file format specification is filled with contradictions to existing ISO/IEC standards products. How do we reasonably migrate from a world where Microsoft Office bound business processes drive critically important economic, governmental and organizational concerns? How do we migrate these processes to OpenDocument (ODF), which is an international standard designed for interoperability? And is there any possibility of converting with acceptable fidelity the billions of binary documents trapped in Microsoft’s proprietary file formats? The world wants to move to ODF XML. But the question is, ‘Can This Be Done?’ And further, ‘Can this be done without costly disruption to our day to day business processes?’ … The daVinci ODF 1.2 and ODF 1.0 plugin demonstrations will be made available to ISO/IEC members as positive and irrefutable proof that ‘it can be done’.”

ODF as the Perfect MS Office File Format begins, “What is the da Vinci plugin for Microsoft Word? Where did it come from? How does it work? And can it really convert files generated by Microsoft Word versions 97-2007 into fully compliant, OpenDocument format-ready applications? Can it do so so without disruption to bound business processes, dependent line of business applications, and assistive technology add-ons? … The OpenDocument format (”ODF”) is able to handle anything Microsoft Office can throw at it, and handle it at least as well as Microsoft’s new EOOXML file formats. ” Article includes “How to Add native file support for OpenDocument to Microsoft Office” and “How to: Interact with Microsoft business processes using OpenDocument.”