PUBLIC MARKS with tags server & standards

Mobile data synchronization is becoming increasingly important for many people, and various standards have arisen to perform this two-way copying 'over-the-air'. The most important platforms that can do wireless synchronisation are ActiveSync that is used to communicate with Exchange Server and Research-in-Motion's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). Both solutions require proprietary server-side software from the vendor, therefore limiting the use of PIMs (personal information managers) to either wired synchronization or irritating 3rd-party synchronizers requiring the installation of client software on the PDA.

Mobile data synchronization is becoming increasingly important for many people, and various standards have arisen to perform this two-way copying 'over-the-air'. The most important platforms that can do wireless synchronisation are ActiveSync that is used to communicate with Exchange Server and Research-in-Motion's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). Both solutions require proprietary server-side software from the vendor, therefore limiting the use of PIMs (personal information managers) to either wired synchronization or irritating 3rd-party synchronizers requiring the installation of client software on the PDA.

The goal for this project is to provide translators to allow for interoperability between applications based on ODF (OpenDocument) 1.0 standards and Microsoft OpenXML based Office applications. As a part of this interoperability initiative, add-ins are being developed that can be installed on top of Microsoft Office Word (document processing), Excel (spreadsheet) and PowerPoint (presentation) applications (Office 2007 / 2003 / XP version) to allow for opening and saving OpenDocument format / ODF files (.odt, .ods and .odp) that adheres to ODF 1.0 specifications. We also provide command line translator utilities that allow doing batch conversions. The converter is based on XSL transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing to manage the packaging (zip / unzip), schema incompatibility processings and the integration into Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We chose to use an Open Source development model that allows developers from all around the world to participate & contribute to the project. Along with the Add-ins for Microsoft Word (v1.0 released), Excel (under development) and PowerPoint (under development), we also provide a command line translator that allows doing batch conversions. These translators can also be run on the server side for certain scenarios.