Novell has joined the board of the Technical Committee for the Open Document Format. 

The format is created by the OASIS standards body. It aims to create an open standard for text and other documents that allows them to be used across applications.

"We've been working a lot on this project. Now we feel that we can best serve the project by taking a role on the board," Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of Linux and open source marketing for Novell told vnunet.com.

Novell doesn't have any products that could use the Open Document standard. The company does bundle a customised version of the Open Office productivity suite with its SuSE desktop Linux product. It is also the second largest contributor to the open source application after Sun Microsystems.

"Novell is committed to helping develop and embrace durable open standards that serve as a better underpinning for computing going forward. The OASIS group is one of the standards that we think has merit," Mancusi-Ungaro said.

The Open Document Format is gaining momentum. Both StarOffice 8 and Open Office 2.0 support the standard in their latest releases, which were issued late September and earlier this week respectively.

WordPerfect developer Corel is a member of Oasis, but currently doesn't support the document format in any of its products. A spokesperson declined to say if the company plans to add support in the next version of the application.

Correl's commitment to the standard was recently questioned after the company vacated its seat on the format's working group for a period of a several weeks.

The state of Mas sachusetts last month drew attention to the Open Document Format when its CIO said that he is likely to require support for the standard in any future software application. This could disqualify Microsoft Office from bidding on government contracts in the state.