IBM to provide export filters to OpenDocument for Lotus Notes
by Volker Weber
Interesting tidbit from the Q&A session with IBM's Kevin Cavanaugh and Peter O'Kelly from the Burton Group. Kevin Cavanaugh, who is responsible for all Notes & Domino development, said that IBM will be providing export filters for the OpenDocument format. You will be able to select Notes documents and save them in a standard format. He has not committed to any particular release dates for these filters. Cavanaugh also said that IBM Workplace 3.0 will support this format for office documents. The current version of Workplace is 2.5 with 2.6 to be released soon.
Update: Arthur Fontaine comments:
Workplace Managed Client 2.6 has the read-write capability for Open Document Format -- no wait for 3.0 on this feature.
Comments
So, IBM, which hasn't supported export filters for Microsoft Word since R5, is going to write the export filters? They have abandoned almost all export filters for the ND6/6.5/7 clients, but they are going to OpenDocument. Sorry, but I am a bit dubious.
Agree with Ben on this one. Notes export (and import) functionality has always been pretty lame. Also, this is such a tranparent attempt to make nice over the OpenDocument format issue. Notes isn't going to suddenly support OpenDocument as a document format. They're doing an exporter. and what about import? For Workplace this isn't any big deal since the client uses OpenOffice under the covers anyway...
Ben, my role was the moderator for the Q&A. If my role would have been a reporter I would have grilled Kevin for this quite obvious omission.
Bob, the Workplace editors are based on OOo. However, IBM has forked the code more than 2 years ago and has never given any code back to the project. It will be interesting to see how they incorporate the OOo2 code now that the license has changed.
I'm not surprised. I wonder when IBM decides to change to OpenOffice at whole. The only problem would be transfering all the Excel macros. ;-)
Actually Workplace Managed Client 2.6 has the read-write capability for Open Document Format -- no wait for 3.0 on this feature.
Volker: right, I forgot that IBM was using the older code stream. So how did they get OpenDocument support? Merge it themselves? Hmm.
Here's a question for Kevin: when will we see OpenDocument support in Lotus SmartSuite? ;-)
*sigh*
An OpenDocument exporter from Notes 6+ is a friggin STYLESHEET, for cryin' out loud! What's with the skepticism?
@Nathan: XSLT 2.0 blows your mind and the real challenge is how conceptually similar DXL and ODF are. The meat is in the fineprint: Graphics, OLE, Attachments...
We are exited anyway
:-) stw
