26.03.2008
Microsoft and Sourcesense Collaborate to Support Open Source, Apache POI
Microsoft and Sourcesense, a European open source systems integration consultancy, announced to collaborate on the strategy, development and deployment of open source solutions for the Microsoft Office product suite.
The partnership aims at contributing to the development of a new version of Apache POI, a project of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), used in financial services and enterprise applications, it is also used to create, edit and read Microsoft Office formats used in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Visio.
Apache POI is a Java application programming interface (API) used to access and manage Microsoft Office binary formats, and can be applied to binary format documents by alleviating the need for complex programming and reverse engineering.
According to a release, Apache POI libraries are used in open source projects, developing future libraries to support the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats will play an important role in new interoperability scenarios where XML-based standard formats will be key for Office documents.
Apache POI support for Open XML is currently in development within the Apache Software Foundation; its first release is anticipated during the second quarter of 2008. Code contributions are made by ASF members and committers, and overseen by the Apache POI Project Management Committee (PMC). A training session on how to use Apache POI, led by Nick Burch, Apache POI PMC Chair, will be held at ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam.
