Questions for IBM

In the late summer IBM announced their support to the OpenOffice.org community and about a week later, they announced a new free (of charge) product, IBM Lotus Symphony. The new product is basically a stand-alone version of the productivity tools in Lotus Notes 8.

If you ask me, I think it's great that IBM is now standing up behind OpenOffice.org together with other large companies and I think it looks great that IBM will contribute with better acceptability and usability, I'm sure that OpenOffice.org can take advantage of that. Just have a look at the work IBM did to make Symphony look that nice.

I'm using Lotus Notes 8 from IBM and I think it shows that IBM Lotus is going in the right direction. But I still need answers for two questions:

1. Will IBM Lotus productivity tools (in whatever product package you get them) follow the OpenOffice.org code line in the future ?
   The version we use now is a very old OpenOffice.org
   
2. Will IBM Lotus productivity tools support OpenOffice.org extensions (oxt-files) ?

I would very much like to tell customers that the IBM Lotus product line is on the right track, but I can't do this as long as the code is more than two years old and doesn't support one of the most important and most significant improvements in OpenOffice.org.

I have tried to ask around at IBM in Denmark without luck. If anyone here can find out who can answer these question, please let me know.