Oracle has imposed a fee of US$90 per user on a plug-in for Microsoft Office that was available at no cost under Sun Microsystems' ownership.

Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI).

The Danish Parliament has decided on a set of rules to which open document formats must adhere if they are to be used by state authorities after April 1, 2011, Denmark's Liberal Party said on Friday.

In the latest sniping in the long-running feud over document format standards, IBM this week claimed that Microsoft Corp.'s Excel 2007 corrupted formulas and data in spreadsheets created in the OpenDocument Format.

As expected, Microsoft on Tuesday began letting users of Office 2007 download Service Pack 2, marking a milestone in the company's document format battles with governments and other vendors.

Sun Microsystems and IBM Wednesday announced the Open Document Format Toolkit Union, an open-source project aimed at making it easier for developers to use ODF.

IBM is threatening to leave organizations that set standards for software interoperability because of concerns that their processes are not always fair.