Trials planned for ODF Office plug-in

If all goes as planned, Massachusetts will help validate a plug-in which allows Microsoft Office users to save documents in the OpenDocument format, said Gary Edwards, one of the developers behind the software.

Edwards, a volunteer open-source programmer who founded the OpenDocument Foundation, said the plug-in software itself will not be made publicly available until it is vetted by government customers who have shown interest in the OpenDocument, or ODF, standard format.

"We'd rather have a level of validation that is worthy enough so that when other entities want to consider OpenDocument, eighty percent of the testing is done for them," Edwards told CNET News.com on Friday.

He said that the OpenDocument Foundation will respond to a request for information Massachusetts issued last week on an ODF plug-in for Office. He noted that the plug-in for Word, for example, was well tested but there remains work to be done for Excel and PowerPoint.

The decision to not release the plug-in is not for lack of interest.

Edwards said that about he received about 60 different enquiries about the plug-in after one day, some of them from outside the U.S. Some were from consultants who work with government customers and some were from IT employees at governments, including Portugal.

"What's really astounding is not the plug-in but the reaction to the plug-in announcement," he said. "We've scratched something, touched a nerve where people have been watching OpenDoucment but never thought it could be applied to the situation they are in."

The plug-in is designed to allow Microsoft Office users open and save files in the OpenDocument, a format supported in other productivity suites but not current versions of Office or Office 2007.

As to who helped the development of the plug-in, Edwards wouldn't say except to joke that "people who use numbers in their names" offered some unsolicited suggestions.

The technical break-through came when developers stopped following Microsoft's interoperability instructions and started considering undocumented APIs, he said.

"Your big mistake is following instructions Microsoft provides. You need to be looking at what Microsoft does, not what they tell you to do," Edwards said.