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."

Re:I'm afraid...

[aussie_a]

What about the rest of the world? Just because the American government will continue to support the convicted monopoly doesn't mean the rest of the world will. IBM is marketting this mostly to developing nations (I'm assuming developing nations who have computers with internet access). To them, saving the money from paying for Microsoft licenses is more then reason enough to swap over. Throwing in support from a large corporation is merely gravy.

But what I'm a bit confused about, is the usefulness of having it work as a web portal. "Good" nations do have trouble with internet connections, I can only assume it's as bad if not worse in developing nations. So why create an online solution, instead of a scaled down simple offline solution? Wouldn't that fit their needs better?

Re:The legacy of saving everything in MS Office

[Rocketship Underpant]

When I was in China a few years ago, I saw people in banks using abacuses. Not to denigrate them for that -- they were faster and more efficient with them than the average North American worker is with a computer. (at least, that's my subjective impression)

Re:Web 2.0.

[Eivind]

Did you notice you actually said nothing ? Do you by any chance work in marketing ?

Here's a hint: throwing around buzzwords doesn't indicate you actually said anything.

Re:Strategy

[ken kenobi]

Dropping MS Office support would be the kiss of death to OpenOffice.

I promise you the average user does not want to go through a convoluted process to edit their existing docs, they just want to hit Open...

Keep in mind one of the ways MS Word overtook WordPerfect was by supporting the opening of WordPerfect files

Re:I'm afraid...

[m50d]

Come now, you know it doesn't count to slashdot unless it's in the US.

Re:Strategy

[pubjames]

"Sorry, Firefox is not in our default installation and I'm not authorized to install software (and IT will not support it)."

Well, of course in that kind of situation then the only thing to do is to send them a Word document, (or better - a PDF).

But it misses my point, it's about mindshare and attitude - we need to get to a point where people and companies will start to feel embarrassed that they can't read OpenDocument formats.

Re:Strategy

[smchris]

3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice. Concentrate on making OpenOffice a great tool for creating OpenDocument format files.

Same argument I used to hear when I was running OS/2: "Don't buy WordPerfect 7 (probably the last Win 3.1 version) that would run on WinOS/2, buy an OS/2 word processor.

We can see how well that worked out. The important thing is that IBM (gulp) is helping to promote a _new_ standard.

Re:Strategy

[vidarh]

Personally, I'd have to drop OpenOffice if I couldn't read and write MS Office files. Why? Because that's what I receive and that's what people expect 90% of the time or more. That is THE feature I need in a word processor - anything else I can compromise on. Sad, I know, but that is what we have to deal with until Open Office has a far greater market share than it currently has.

Messing around with an external converter would piss me off, possibly enough that I'd write a patch to make open office automatically use it to get back to the current usability.

In other words, the functionality is there because it is what users want. And this is open source - you'd be able to take it out of the "official" version, but my bet is that practically any distro that includes Open Office would apply patches to include automatic MS Office filters.

Fighting your users is only an acceptable strategy if you're a monopolist and your users have nowhere they can reasonably go. It doesn't work if your users can just go elsewhere, because they will.

Re:Good for Open Document format

[hritcu]

Now you can add IBM support and see that Open Document can become a huge success.

IBM's support was there right from the start (making the standard). If you go here [oasis-open.org] you will see that the participants in the Open Document TC are:

• Adobe Systems
• IBM
• Intel
• Novell
• Sun Microsystems

IBM is also selling Workplace Documents [lotus.com], based on source forked from OpenOffice.org about two years ago. Since this summer Sun droped SISSL [eweek.com] for OpenOffice.org (which is from 2.0 LGPL only) IBM cannot just fork OpenOffice 2 and get Open Document support for free. However, this doesn't mean that seeing IBM promote Open Document is new or surprising in some way.