After the noise over whether or not the implementation of ODF (Open Document Format) in SP2 for Microsoft Office 2007 was deliberately broken for monopolistic purposes or incompetently implemented (or a combination of both) it’s nice to see that there is active interoperability work going on between vendors and developers at the ODF PlugFest, and the KOffice developers Jos van den Oever and Sven Langkamp attended and contributed to an article on the KDE DOT news website and Sven blogged about his positive experiences at the workshop.

It was first time I was going to such a workshop and I had expected that there would be fights between the different vendors like it happened in some blogs before the workshop. It was a pleasant surprise for me that the athmosphere was very friendly and productive. It was really nice to meet other people projects/companys, put the competition aside for some time, work and drink some beer together.

One neat feature mentioned there is the OfficeShots website which lets you submit an ODF document and then get back renderings of it (PDF, screenshot, ODF) from various ODF implementations. There are 8 listed at present (including KOffice), but sadly MS Word or Google Docs aren’t amongst them (yet).