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IBM integrates Lotus Notes with OpenOffice

Sep. 12, 2007

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Yesterday, IBM said that it hopes to develop feature enhancements to the OpenOffice movement, and help encourage broader adoption of the OpenDocument format (ODF) standard used in OpenOffice.

Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration division, said the company has been using OpenOffice code for the past several years to create its own version of the office applications integrated into the Lotus Notes 8 collaboration suite.

By incorporating OpenOffice features, Lotus Notes gained integrated office applications that seamlessly work within the application, Heintzman said.

He added "we decided that the time was right." Overall, all future Lotus Notes and IBM products that incorporate OpenOffice code will use it from the community rather than from what had been IBM's forked version of the open-source project.

He said the reason for the move is that IBM anticipates shifting demand from customers, changing specifications and greater adoption of ODF, as well as other changes expected in future office applications.

To build on those features from OpenOffice, IBM Lotus developers have enhanced some accessibility features for the visually impaired and other handicapped users, he said.

In the past, IBM had been doing this work outside of the OpenOffice community. With yesterday's announcement however, the company will stop work on its own version of OpenOffice.

The company will dedicate a core team of thirty-five programmers in China to the OpenOffice project, and more people will be added as needed around the world, he said.

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager at Sun Microsystems for the OpenOffice.org project, called IBM's announcement "extremely important."

"What this will do for us is not only enhance the community by expanding it," but adding future richness and additional ODF technology to the project, Suarez-Potts said.

Another added benefit is that IBM will add these into many of their existing products, which are distributed worldwide, he said. "It's a win-win. The IT community is very happy about all of this and is looking forward to working with IBM."

OpenOffice.org includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, database and other modules and uses ODF as its native file format.

OpenOffice also fully supports other common file formats, including Microsoft Office. OpenOffice runs on all major platforms, including Windows, Vista, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS-X. It is also available in more than a hundred languages.

OpenOffice.org is interoperable with other popular suites and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial, under its GNU Lesser General Public License.

Created seven years ago by Sun, OpenOffice.org has been downloaded nearly 100 million times, according to Sun Microsystems.

"IBM's initiative is great news for the tens of millions of users of OpenOffice.org and the thousands of individual members of the project. However, equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO ODF standard. ODF is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the industry to unify around a real standard, and deliver lasting benefit to IT users and workers of desktop technology."

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Source: IT World Canada