IBM to lift lid on its OpenOffice plans next week

IBM will help develop collaboration features for the open source desktop of the future but it’s not clear how much of Notes -- if any -- will find its way into OpenOffice.

On Monday, Big Blue announced that it has joined OpenOffice – a major open source project led by its rival Sun – and its initial contribution of accessibility enhancements and other code to the OpenOffice project.

IBM isn’t ready to "itemize" the lines of Notes code that will be contributed to OpenOffice.org but the company will detail its plans at an IBM conference next week, one executive said.

One IBM collaboration executive said the possibility of integrating core e-mail, calendaring and groupware features of its Lotus Notes into OpenOffice is an “interesting question” but whether or not that is the right approach for the open source Office productivity suite is unclear.

But no doubt IBM will be involved in the collaboration features of the next generation Internet-based desktop, which will require groupware and communications services.

“Certainly from a product standpoint we firmly believe in an integrated collaboration client which includes rich editing as well as tight integration of instant messaging, activity-based computing and email calendaring that allows us to seamlessly move from one app to another,” said Douglas Heintzman, director of technology for IBM’s collaboration technologies, who is based in Somers, NY. he said. “It’s a major differentiator we are productizing in our product but will that level of integration flow to open source project is not clear and I wouldn’t want to speculate."

“We support activity at Mozilla on Thunderbird and other open source projects and Zimbra,” he said. “It’s an interesting question because so much of the e-mail world is moving to a web 2.0 web based model. Its an interesting question but I don’t k now about that,” he said about the possibility of integrated e-mail features in OpenOffice. “I’m unaware about any direct conversations about that."

The OpenOffice.org folks say that's not going to happen.

It’s not in the plan for OpenOffice 3.0 or future versions of the open source desktop, said John McCreesh, Marketing Project Lead of OpenOffice.org, in an e-mail exchange.

“There's nothing about that in the IBM statement,” McCreesh said, referring to the possibility of contributing Notes colaboartion code to the open source projects. “It's not in the roadmap. It's much more likely that we would do co-operative work with one or more open-source email client projects to integrate OpenOffice.org more closely with their software.”