Microsoft and the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics are going to create an open source translator between China's emerging Unified Office Format (UOF) and Microsoft's own Open XML (OOXML) file formats.

It is a burst of execution-suspected interoperability that one might lay to the number of Chinese armed with computers and the Chinese government's determination to have its own non-Microsoft format. UOF is also based on the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and there's been talk of those two combining, but it may or may not be technically possible - or politically viable.

According to Microsoft, "Our customers have told us their data needs can't be addressed by a one-format or one-standard-fits-all approach. 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 also announced the beta release of ODF-OOXML translation tools for XP and Excel and PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 as part of its 10-month-old Open XML Translator project, started after an ODF-embracing Massachusetts and its ilk bent Microsoft's fingers back to its wrist.

This is one of the top 25 projects on SourceForge, and the Word tool delivered earlier this year has been downloaded upwards of 100,000 times, Microsoft said. When done, the new UOF translators will be made available on SourceForge under a Berkeley license as free downloadable add-ins for Office 2003 and 2007. A preview is expected this summer, and final versions at the end of January.

The plug-ins will let Microsoft Office open and save UPF files.

UOF is being developed by the Chinese Office Software Work Group (COSWG) led by China's Ministry of Information Industry, a bunch of native office suite suppliers (like the RedOffice fork of OpenOffice), academic institutions like the Beijing Information Technology Institute and LitSoft, a Lenovo entity that will be helping with the translators.