IBM has officially launched the commercial version of its Lotus Symphony suite of productivity applications, and looks set amount a challenge to Microsoft Office in its enterprise heartland.

Microsoft is finally adding support for ODF (OpenDocument Format for Office Applications) and Adobe PDF to its Office productivity suite, the company announced on Wednesday. Support for ODF and PDF will be included in the software through Microsoft Office Service Pack 2, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, according to Microsoft.

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into ODT (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents. Using odtwriter, you can generate ODF files on machines that don't have ODF-compatible word processors installed, such as those running lightweight Linux distros, or simply compose documents in a text editor and leave the task of properly formatting them to odtwriter.