This is not new news, but when I was at the Technet event yesterday it did come up.  Someone asked about the what and why of Open XML and Open Document format.  Luckily Darren Strange was on hand to answer the question (which he has done before).  ODF is a great standard, but does not allow for amny of the things that our customers want, such as charts (to name just one).  It is not unusual to have more than one standard way to do things (such as ASCII and EBDIC for character sets), so while ECMA has ratified OpenXML we are now working with a 2^nd standards body (ISO) to also get OpenXML ratified there too.

For more information about the ODF converter, have a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/odftranslator/ for the code and this article for news - Microsoft Rolling Out ODF Document Converter.

Ttfn

David