Novell is to support Microsoft's new Office 2007 file formats in versions of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite it ships to customers. The company announced the move as part of its new collaborative relationship with Microsoft.

OpenOffice.org ships with Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop and its Open Workgroup Suite , which runs on both Windows and Linux. From the end of January 2007, Novell will include software to translate between OpenOffice.org's ODF file formats and Microsoft's Open XML. A translator for word processor documents will be available first, with support for spreadsheets and presentations due later in 2007.

“OpenOffice.org is very important to Novell, and as our customers deploy Linux desktops across their organisations, they're telling us that sharing documents between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office is a must-have," said Nat Friedman, Novell 's chief technology and strategy officer for Open Source.