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IBM is poised to join the assault on Microsoft's traditional dominance of preferred office applications, as Big Blue sets to roll out an "MS-Office killer" with the not-so-threatening title of "Workspace," complete with Open Document Format (ODF) support.

Wind of the upcoming releases swirls this way via ZDNet's David Berlind, who had the opportunity to chat with IBM's Ken Bisconti about it.

"Built on top of IBM's Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based Websphere application server stack, Workplace can trace its pedigree to the collaboration technologies found in Lotus Domino/Notes and to Big Blue's portal technologies, typically based on WebSphere," writes Berlin.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts recently bailed on Microsoft Office products in favor of Sun Microsystem's ODF as the state office standard. IBM, no doubt encouraged by the development, realizes the potential of large office solutions with ODF support.

Berlind says storage capabilities will set the new system apart.

"Using the IBM's Java-based Cloudscape database technology that was recently contributed as open source to the Apache Software Foundation - users will be able to save their data to the network and, much the same way their portal with all its components follows them everywhere, so too will the storage and everything the user has saved to it," he says.

Check out the rest of Berlind's article here.