
During an exclusive preview of IBM Docs, Jeanette Barlow, Product Manager, IBM said, "We are socially enabling the document process. We did not want to build just an editor. We wanted to create a solution that tackled the problems that arise when teams work together and collaborate on documents."
We observed co-editing in real-time, the ability to assign sections in a document to different people and a more meaningful way to track versions and audit changes attributed to different users. IBM has a strong foothold in the enterprise space and Google Docs (which has been favoured by many organizations) may have some real competition soon! But we'll have to watch out for IBM's pricing details, and Google may have an advantage here. Google also has an established enterprise base for its Google Docs offering in India with organizations like India Infoline and Zensar Technologies using it extensively.
The desktop client has a Lotus Symphony codebase which is based on Apache OpenOffice. Barlow informed that IBM will eventually merge the Symphony code back into OpenOffice core. "But we are also building from the ground up, a browser-based Web solution," said Barlow.
By the end of this year IBM will have both a rich client and also a cloud based solution for office productivity. The latter will be a Web-based solution based on HTML 5, and will not require browser plug-ins. So it would definitely be a draw for enterprises that just need basic editing and do not want to incur huge costs on client licenses. Collaboration and social features would be the big draw! That's in line with IBM's theme at Lotusphere 2012 -- "Business. Made Social."
IBM Docs Beta can be lively experienced here:
IBM Docs Beta