Top > Webmaster > 2005 > December > 2005-12-11

IBM Endorses Open Document Format

Workplace Managed Client, a full client-office productivity suite for editing, creating and sharing word-processing, documents and spreadsheets, has been taken under the wing of Big Blue`s support of the OpenDocument Format for Office Applications. The desktop standard is already in its next version.

Art Fontaine, manager for WorkPlace Manager Client in IBM`s Lotus division, said IBM is endorsing ODF as an alternative to remove interoperability as a barrier to desktop productivity. `While everybody could read and write Microsoft formats to the degree to which they could decipher the file formats, there`s always some part of Office that is not decipherable or public, or is retained by Microsoft,` he continued. Fontaine said interest in ODF and open source technologies is high in emerging markets where Microsoft Office isn`t necessarily so pervasive, including India, Brazil, Russia and China. `These people have a responsibility to avoid getting themselves boxed into a place where the content they create gets locked out from any of their constituents because it`s an old file format or because it requires the newest software to read,` Fontaine said.

When Workplace Managed Client 2.6 appears next year, word processing, graphs and spreadsheets editor tools will let users send, receive and rewrite files saved in the ODF standard. Workplace Managed Client had previously supported OpenOffice as its default productivity format, along with Microsoft Office. With Workplace Managed Client, a Web administrator creates an account for an employee on a server. The employee can then access that server and obtain the desktop code for document management, e-learning, messaging and instant messaging provisioned over the Web to his or her desktop.