Microsoft has announced a new partnership with Sourcesense, a leading
European open source systems integration consultancy. The two companies
will collaborate on the strategy, development and deployment of open
source solutions for the Microsoft Office product suite. One of the
initial goals of the partnership is contributing to the development of
a new version of Apache POI, a top-level project of the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF). Widely used in financial services and critical
enterprise applications across related sectors, Apache POI is a leading
open source file format reader and writer to create, edit and read
Microsoft Office formats used in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Visio.
Apache POI is a Java application programming interface (API) used to
access and manage Microsoft Office binary formats, and can be easily
applied to today's billions of binary format documents by alleviating
the need for complex programming and/or reverse engineering. Because
Apache POI libraries are used in numerous open source projects, developing
future libraries to support the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats (the
default file format in the 2007 Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint
products) will play an important role in new interoperability scenarios
where XML-based standard formats will be key for Office documents. Apache
POI support for Open XML is currently in development within the Apache
Software Foundation; its first release is anticipated during the second
quarter of 2008. Code contributions are made by ASF members and committers
(developers authorized to 'commit' or 'write' code, patches or
documentation to the ASF repository), and overseen by the Apache POI
Project Management Committee (PMC). Details are published in the
Microsoft press release "Microsoft and Sourcesense Partner to Contribute
to Open Source, Apache POI to Support Ecma Office Open XML File Formats."
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