IBM To Support OpenDocument Next Year

An anonymous reader writes "IBM announced this weekend that early next year it will begin supporting the OpenDocument standard in its WorkPlace line of products. They're planning on pushing this widely accessible format and their products in developing nations." From the article: "Rather than create an analog to Microsoft Office, IBM is offering editors for creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations within a Web browser. Documents are delivered via a Web portal and stored in shared directories. Access control and document management tools allow people to share and edit documents with others. Until now, Workplace supported the formats from open-source product OpenOffice, from which the OpenDocument was derived. Workplace Managed Client software also can read, write and edit documents created with Microsoft Office."

Comments

Good for Open Document format

[lord_rob the only on]

Sun support, Novell support, Google and many many less-known software vendors supports. Now you can add IBM support and see that Open Document can become a huge success.

You can read OpenOffice.org developpers' blog to see many simillar stories of companies or organizations adopting opendocument standard.

Open Document Format != Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

This misconception is not helped by the presence of Tux at the top of this report. /. should know better.

ODF is a format for saving documents. It is platform independent and there is no reason why it should not be used by any application that creates documents, whether open or closed source.

Actually, this isn't a Web browser implementation

[Dutchmang]

One error in the report is that it's a Web-based implementation. It's actually an Eclipse-based implementation. The container for the ODF-compliant editors is IBM Workplace Managed Client. The container itself is a very interesting thing because it lets you build applications of just about any type, which are then deployed with the client over the network (or added to existing deployed clients as the case may be.) It also runs unmodified across Windows and Linux, because the Eclipse/Workplace layer does all the interaction with the OS windows, file system etc.

The point about the ODF support is that, like all standards, it takes interoperability out of the equation and lets vendors compete on the implementations. OpenOffice is essentially a MS Office competitor, using the same desktop-centric deployment and support model, except with open source and cross-OS capabilities. This is good for folks who like the MS Office "way" but want choice. IBM is approaching the problem of desktop productivity tools a little differently, as a locally installed but network managed app. Again, innovating in the implementation because the standard lets you do that.