Microsoft and Beihang University (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) will collaborate in order to create an open source translator project between China’s Unified Office Format (UOF) and the Ecma Open XML File Formats.

China’s Unified Office Format is currently developed by the Chinese Office Software Work Group (COSWG), an entity led by the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), major suppliers of Chinese office software suites, and academic institutions such as the Beijing Information Technology Institute.

According to the Redmond company, the UOF translation will be licensed as open source software and will be available as free add-ins for MS Office Word 2003 and 2007. The first preview of the UOF translator will be published this summer and Microsoft hopes to release the final versions early in 2008.

“Our customers have told us their data needs can’t be addressed by a one-format or one-standard-fits-all approach,” said Jean Paoli, general manager of Interoperability and XML Architecture at Microsoft. “Everyone wants to use their data in slightly different ways. That’s why we are enabling customers to pick from whatever format they want to use with their Office documents — whether it’s ODF, Open XML, PDF, or new standards like UOF.”

Microsoft announced also the beta release of translation tools for Windows XP, and the 2003 and 2007 versions of Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office PowerPoint as part of the Open XML Translator project launched in July 2006.

In February, developers of the open source project to produce a translator between OpenDocument format (ODF) and Open XML document formats announced the completion of the 1.0 release of the technology. The completed Open XML Translator enables conversion of documents from one format to the other and is available for anyone to download and use at no cost. When plugged into Microsoft Office Word, for example, the Translator provides customers with the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format.

Microsoft announced its support for the open source project to build a technical bridge between Open XML and ODF in July 2006 to provide interoperability between formats. Since inception, it has remained among the 30 most active projects on SourceForge.net and has been downloaded more than 50,000 times.