IBM Lotus Notes could be tipping point in anti-Microsoft Office fray

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 19 September 2007 05:15

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft arch rival IBM has thrown its considerable weight behind the OpenOffice.org open source office productivity project with a commitment of 35 staff to the effort. However, the tipping point in the concerted effort to unseat Microsoft's hold on the office space could be IBM's promise to contribute elements of its powerful Lotus Notes groupware suite to the open source project.

While OpenOffice.org and the slicker commercial office suite Sun's Star Office, and now Lotus Symphony, can all serve the needs of many users as a cheap or free alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office offerings, a glaring weakness is the lack of an equivalent integrated email, calendaring and contacts client to Microsoft's Outlook.

The Lotus Notes groupware suite, with 250 million users worldwide, is primarily aimed at the high-end enterprise market and has features that go way beyond what the average office or home user needs. However, its calendaring and email components are at least on a par with Outlook and support the iCalendar standard, also supported by the calendar component of Outlook 2007.

At present, IBM's version of OpenOffice.org under the Lotus Symphony banner only offers the documents, spreadsheets and presentations applications, which are also freely available in the growing list of open source office productivity alternatives for users. Needless to say, there are already enough of these alternatives, which are all largely compatible with each other and Microsoft Office and which all support the ODF open documents standard.

The biggest contribution that IBM can make to the OpenOffice.org project aside from adding its undoubted expertise in improving the overall quality of the software is to quickly bring to market a cut down open source version of Lotus Notes. If it does so, that could provide the tipping point that helps to loosen Microsoft's vice like grip on the office productivity market.