The expected benefits of ODF depend however in a large way from the strengtening of development infrastructures and entities able to use the format and innovate on it.

The toolkits available today for ODF are somewhat limited to a traditional scope of office applications and tend to lag behind in the following areas:

• entreprise needs (business intelligence, document management...)
• use cases (highly collaborative environments, nomadic uses, SOA, REST...)
• standard's specification (implementation scope and features' span)

The lpOD project contributes to the expansion of the OpenDocument Format ecosystem through its implementation of the ISO standard ISO/IEC 26300.

• Defining a Free Software API for the ISO standard ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF)
• Developing and validating an implementation for higher level use cases

The standardization of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) has shown the economical and technological importance of a common base for office file formats, especially in the european context.

This format benefits from the recognition and the recommendation by several major players in the software industry as well as several major I.T. users. Advantages of ODF include: openness of the standard (as defined by the EIF and LCEN legislations), clear separation between the semantical level and the representation of data, no tie in between the tool and the document, interoperability, accessibility and dependability for the long term. Its XML structure and its breadth of features (multidimensional tables, RDF, metadata) make ODF the natural pivot format for next generation, complex and multimedia data exchange beyond the traditional office use.