Lotus had adopted the SIMPLE protocol early in its branching off from SIP, and it still a work in progress.  Now, like many others, Lotus has adopted XMPP, the protocol behind Jabber as well.  This means that there is yet another mainstream product that is interoperable with other XMPP-based services, including APU IM and Google Talk.

Source:  http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2068781,00.asp

Its been five years since Sun Open Sourced the StarOffice suite they purchased from German company Star Division.  Today OpenOffice has released version 2.0 which represents a very significant re-engineering of the 1.0 codebase.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years. Easy to use and fluidly interoperable with every major office suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0 realises the potential of open source.

With new features, advanced XML capabilities and native support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, OpenOffice.org 2.0 gives users around the globe the tools to be engaged and productive members of their society.

ZDNet Coverage: 

Version 2.0 brings some significant new features, and Google has pledged to help distribute OpenOffice through a high-profile pact with Sun. But perhaps more significant, OpenOffice.org uses the standardized OpenDocument format that stands in stark contrast to Microsoft's proprietary formats.

Massachusetts has required support of OpenDocument, and Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source, has urged computer users to pressure software companies, governments and corporations to support OpenDocument.

Interesting IBM developer works article:

Standards and specs: Early adopters

Follow the pitfalls and perks that come from adopting a standard before it becomes one

This is a rather hardware focused standards article, but there are some valid lessons to be gained.

Remember that standardization is about interoperability first and foremost. If competitiveness between prospective partners in a standardization effort sinks the standard, everybody loses.

Which is why open standards are so important.  There is a great difference between industry standards and open standards.  Industry standards are lead by companies who form loose partnerships with eachother when developing new product lines with the desire for interoperability.  Open standards are those lead by independent standards bodies, usually with open participation and vendor independence.  This doesn't mean that open standards sometimes don't suffer the results of vendor competition, if they are implemented inconsistently (thus breaking the standard for advantage).

Anyway, good article.  I attempted once, to explain the difference between Open Standards and Open Source, which may provide some relevant background to this topic. 

JSR-168 is a portlet standard that allows any compliant portal to make use of these mini-applications. The potential for providing a mix of applications produced external to an organization, yet consumed internally is great.

There are many companies providing such services in a-la-carte ASP fashion, I thought it would be good to start collecting resources for free portlets. As uPortal is JSR-168 compliant it is likely that we will be consuming such portlets in the future for our University Portal.

• Gems - A Collection small JSR-168 compliant Portlets
• http://community.java.net/portlet/
• http://www.jsr168.org/
• http://portlets.blogspot.com/

As the infrastructure maintenance and PC support operations mature, an IT department must continue to innovate. Its value proposition is the packaging and distribution of meaningful services aligned with the business needs. It includes partnering and consulting with customer groups in innovative spaces like collabortion, web publishing, and self-service. A higher level information creation and distribution channel needs to be created to support rapid assembly of reusable components. If given tools, advanced user groups should be able to build communities which can meet their own lightweight application needs, filling gaps that a centralized transaction system is not meant to.

Will IT Departments Still Exist in 2010? ...

In The Continuing Disappearance of Document Management, James Till, vice president of Marketing for Xythos Software Inc., describes how the advent of Open Standards such as HTTP, SSL and WebDAV have shaken up the traditional Document Management Industry, as well as call to question complicated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite approaches to handling content within your organization.

I too have been stepping back from previous declarations of ECM as the solution, only because the implication is that an ECM strategy equals and ECM product. This is not always the case. In the emerging agile architecture environment, simple solutions that act as a bridges between personal productivity software running on desktops and distributed storage and workflow might fit the bill....

As OpenOffice 2.0 gets closer to being finalized, they have started to release preview release snapshots. Of greater interest to me at this point is a nice list of new features.

So why the jump from 1.x to 2.0? Here are the things that stood out to me:

1. Switch to OpenDoc XML format from the Oasis Open Standards Group
2. Native widgets on Windows XP, Gnome, and KDE
3. Improved MS Office import/export
4. Export XHTML 1.0 Strict from all modules

If you have ever seen the export of html from Microsoft Word, then you will be especially excited about #4. Sure running things through htmltidy works, but think about the joy of having someone post web pages or content snippets using strict xhtml 1.0 from a word processor.

Worried about persistent security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, officials at the Pennsylvania State University system have taken the unusual step of recommending that students, professors, and staff members stop using the popular Web browser. "The threats are real, and alternatives exist," the university said in an announcement posted on its Web site this week.

She cited reports that the new Firefox Web browser, for example, is much less prone than Internet Explorer to download so-called spyware, or programs surreptitiously placed on a computer in order to record confidential information such as passwords.

W3C moves ahead with mobile Web standard - Efforts to improve the Web-surfing capabilities of handheld devices took a leap forward Thursday with the recommendation of a new standard by the World Wide Consortium (W3C). Infoworld Standards

CC/PP 1.0 Makes a lot of sense. Allow the web client to communicate with the web server in an intelligent way to negotiate a viewable format/display size.