The company previewed early code Monday at the Deutsche Notes Users Group conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. ODF is a proposed standard backed by Sun Microsystems, IBM and other non-Microsoft players that promises easy document interchange between applications and generations of applications.

Microsoft has been slammed because its versions of Word changed formats and introduced portability problems when users of one version tried to open a document created in another. But the Microsoft Office suite, which includes the Word application, accounts for more than 90 percent of the office productivity software market.

Some of those problems were erased when Microsoft added a save-to-HTML option in newer Office versions. But critics were not assuaged and said Microsoft still thwarted interoperability between its applications and those of other vendors.

Microsoft also has said its Office 2007 release will support what it calls an open Office XML, although competitors and critics contend that no one is sure how open that format will be. Office 2007 also will save to the Adobe PDF format.

To no one's surprise, IBM publicly threw its weight behind ODF late last year. IBM's latest Workplace Managed Client 2.6, which shipped early this year, already featured the ODF editors.

"What's new here is we're saying we're bringing that ODF functionality to 125 million Notes users," said Ken Bisconti, vice president of workplace applications for IBM Software.

The ODF standard was ratified by OASIS in May 2005 and more recently by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It remains a rallying point among non-Microsoft office software vendors, none of which have gained much traction against the Office juggernaut.

The editors in Workplace and those upcoming in Notes differ from the lightweight, browser-based editors that IBM has shipped for some time with its WebSphere portal. "These are actual ODF editors with code running on the client," Bisconti said.

The next Notes client, part of the Hannover server release, will give millions of Notes users "alternatives to existing integration with proprietary document formats such as those in Microsoft Office," according to an IBM statement.

Last year, Sun Microsystems started pushing ODF, claiming that applications that support the format will be easy to store and reuse regardless of the applications running on users’ desktops. Sun's StarOffice, as well as OpenOffice, claim ODF compliance, but neither has discernible market share vs. Microsoft Office.

The state of Massachusetts weighed in on the format issue last year, saying that future applications bought for the state must support ODF or PDF formats. But the state later appeared to back down.