After the European Union’s high court fined Microsoft with $2.63 for its marketing campaign of the Windows operating system, the European Commission has started investigating the software giant once again. This time, concerns are raised over Microsoft Office’s abilities to work with files associated with other similar products.

Right now, Microsoft Office works with files using the Office Open XML, which was accepted by the International Standards Organization as a standard, together with the older Sun-developed OpenDocument Format. However, the Redmond-based company has failed to make the full specifications of its file format public, resulting in a poor compatibility with other companies’ products.

The European Commission has urged Microsoft to add ODF support to its Office suit and the software giant has agreed to do so, but the process will take time, and the first version to integrate it perfectly is not expected until the firs half of 2009. The company has also stated that it will also start to make older versions of the Office compatible with ODF.

At this moment, people who want to open ODF files with Microsoft’s Office suit have to use a translator, which proves to be uncomfortable and makes most people avoid using products from other companies.

Even though the company that created Windows has shown to be willing to take steps in reaching product compatibility, some people are skeptical about Microsoft’s interest to do this. According to them, there are very little chances we would ever see Office working with ODF as good as it does with OO XML.