Ed Brill points to a document in The Boston Globe which is reporting on the inclusion of Office capabilities and ODF into Notes.
How is this improving the experience of the user of the system?
Well I’m not sure exactly, and that’s my problem with the premise that it’s a good idea. If this is going to be a good idea it has to make the experience of the end-user better.
I don’t see anyone ditching Office altogether in favour of an ODF alternative at this point. The problem is the inter-connects between individuals and organisations. Microsoft Office is the standard, because Microsoft Office is the standard.
If anyone creates a Word document they can be confident that whoever they send it to will be able to read it, very few people only communicate within an organisation (where a change of standard is relatively simple). As soon as the communication leaves an organisation you need to go for the highest level of confidence which is Word, Excel, PowerPoint. The next level of confidence is achieved by using Acrobat, but that has certain restrictions that sometimes are a benefit and sometimes not (the ability to edit).
The highest level of confidence equates to the best user experience. using ODF may be free, but it probably gives the person receiving the communication a problem giving them a poor user experience.
Organisations could choose to dual-skill their staff in using two different editors but that’s not a great user experience either.
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Graham Chastney 
The thing for me is that I think organizations waste a ton of money on MS Office every year. Besides updating my resume and creating a fax cover sheet, I might use Word once a year. I use Excel more often because it’s my primary vehicle for transfering data betwen systems, but I never start the day saying “I’m going to create a spreadsheet today”. But maybe I am an atypical office worker. I think most of us in IT are!
One other thing that I don’t think you thought about was that since we, as developers, will be guaranteed to have the ODF suite on the user’s machine, we will be able to write code that interacts with those applications more reliably. No longer will we have to wonder if the user has Excel or Word installed and what version they have. This will be a boon for 3rd party application developers since they will be sure their applications will work every where.
And I think you are wrong about MS Office being the highest level of confidences about being able to be read. I think that plain ascii emails have the highest level of confidence, followed closely by HTML emails and web pages. Companies can be guaranteed that everyone can read plain text emails and most users have a mail client that can read HTML or a browser than can access a web page.
Don’t underestimate the lure of free. Look at what it’s done for Outlook!
Sean—
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Thanks for the comments Sean.
My primary point was that the addition of these capabilities needs to improve the end user experience and not make it worse. If a user needs to use two word processors for instance) they will use the one they already know especially when they already have the confidence that if they send stuff in that format people will be able to cope with it.
To fill out what I meant by ‘highest level of confidence’. What I see is that lots and lots of users want to guarantee that what is sent it what is received at the print level. The problem with text and html is that they both struggle in the area of print.
Your point on applications is a key one and one reason where these capabilities are important because they improve the user experience.
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The only real reason one “needs” Word for documents that are going outside of your organization is if the expectation is that the document needs to be edited by the recipient. How often is that a part of the user experience?
IMHO, ODF for internal docs with conversion to PDF balances cost and user experience very nicely. Preferably, the conversion should be automatic. It could occur at the boundary, with both the ODF and PDF attached as alternate MIME parts, or it could occur when the user clicks the Send button — with the option to over-ride; or even with the option to convert to Word .doc format.
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