Ah, the Christmas spirit of "peace on earth, goodwill to men" must be wafting over Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft said Tuesday that to - wait, lemme quote - "help foster interoperability among office productivity applications," it's gone and published documentation detailing its implementation of the Microsoft-hostile Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1 support that it's put in the beta Office 2007 Service Pack 2, which is scheduled for release next year.

Microsoft, which has proven to be documentation-challenged, describes it as "an extremely valuable contribution to the pursuit of grounded, practical interoperability among applications" and feels so good about it, it says, "This step raises the bar for transparent disclosure of how standard formats are supported at a detailed level."

It expects notes about its implementation of its own Open XML (Ecma 376 Edition 1) in Office will follow in the coming weeks.

These implementation notes are supposed to present a comprehensive picture of how Microsoft is implementing ODF and OOXML in Office and can be had at http://www.documentinteropinitiative.org.

They're supposed to be useful to developers who want to enhance the interoperability of their own solutions with Microsoft products.

Microsoft said its implementation notes include details on implementation decisions; details on additional application-specific data written into files; and details on implementation variances when the standard can't be followed exactly for one reason or another.