Since the launch of the 2007 Microsoft Office system this year, a thriving community has emerged around the Ecma Open XML file formats (also known in standards circles as ECMA-376) because of the formats’ many capabilities, including backwards compatibility with billions of existing documents and support for user-defined schema. But despite the rising popularity of this new international standard, Microsoft also realized that some customers may want to work with other formats, including the OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.0, and committed itself to providing customers with choice, and to addressing the need for document interoperability.
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