When we started thinking about what we could do to support researchers with tools and services, interoperability with existing formats, protocols, and services was amongst our primary goals. The Conference Management Tool (CMT), eJournal, Chem4Word, Creative Commons plugin for Office 2007, "Famulus", etc. are all trying to implement as many of the community standards that are out there (as time/resources allow us of course). We also wanted to support the entire research lifecycle, from client tools to services.

The research repository community has been working on an AtomPub-based protocol, called SWORD, for remotely depositing material in an interoperable fashion. "Famulus", which is going to be released today in public Beta* supports SWORD. We've also worked closely with arXiv.org in their implementation of SWORD and the integration with CMT and our upcoming eJournal Service.

During discussions with the Fedora Commons and DSpace communities, it was suggested to us that an open source plugin for Word 2007 that talks with any repository service through SWORD would be a good idea. I finally managed to put some time aside to develop such a plugin and upload it to Codeplex. You'll need VS.NET 2008 SP1 to load the code and run it (there is currently no separate installer I am afraid but we are working on one). Please let me know if you have any issues. I am sure the code is not perfect and it only covers the basic cases. I hope that the community will pick it up and evolve it.

Codeplex project: WordSWORD.

Update: Well, after John's comment, I decided to rename theCodeplex project to OfficeSWORD and add the same functionality to PowerPoint as well. I'll try to write the code as soon as possible but it's coming.

Update 2: Update done. Now PowerPoint is supported as well.

* More on that as soon as the download link goes live.