In an announcement Monday at the Deutsche Notes User Group conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, IBM showed live code to attendees and unveiled the new capabilities, which allow users to open a received document in Notes without having to launch another application or separate program window. The recipient can then save the information as an ODF document or in its native format.

The new ODF features will be included in a beta release of the Notes client, code-named Hannover, this fall. The final version is due out a year later.

By integrating productivity editors that support the XML-based ODF into Hannover, IBM said, it will be offering flexible new data-sharing capabilities to the more than 125 million Lotus Notes users around the world.

The office productivity editors will include word processing, spreadsheet and presentation capabilities and will enable Lotus Notes users to create, edit and save documents natively in the ODF. The editors will also import and export to supported file formats used by Microsoft Office and previous versions of OpenOffice.

ODF has been a hot topic in the IT world as many users seek alternatives to business productivity applications that rely on proprietary standards. Earlier this month, the International Standards Organization accepted the ODF as an international standard for saving and exchanging digital office documents.