IBM Thursday said it would integrate its new Symphony productivity tools and its Sametime platform to provide users the ability to share documents and communicate in real time.

IBM is working to bring its new productivity tools up to expected IT standards in terms of integration with unified communications platforms. IBM already offers similar integration between Sametime and Microsoft’s Office, and it’s no coincidence that IBM’s announcement comes the week before Microsoft will officially release Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, which is similar to Sametime.

IBM, however, plans to build its Sametime/Symphony marriage around the Eclipse open standard and open APIs for audio, video and PBX integration.

IBM plans to launch the integrated platform in the first half of 2008 and will support it on Sametime 8, which is expected to ship before the end of this year. IBM officials say they are likely to add support for older versions of Sametime at a later date.

The race to provide a fully integrated collaboration platform, including telephony, has renewed a long-standing battle between IBM/Lotus and Microsoft, as well as attracting others, including Google, Novell, Oracle and Sun.

Users are also tracking the technology as evidenced by a recent Network World survey conducted among 245 members of its Technology Opinion Panel. The survey shows 85% view collaboration technologies as “important” or “somewhat important” to their future productivity goals.

Symphony is a suite of document, spreadsheet and presentation applications available free. 

The tools, based on OpenOffice.org 1.2, are in beta and a final ship date has not been announced. Identical versions of the applications are already shipping as embedded tools in Notes 8, which was released in September.

Sametime, which is based on the Eclipse open standard, is IBM’s presence and conferencing platform that also supports audio, video, telephony and real-time collaboration capabilities.

The integration of Symphony and Sametime centers on uploading presentations into Sametime conferencing. Users also can upload text documents and spreadsheets. In addition, IBM is integrating the upload capability into its Sametime Unyte hosted conferencing service, which is the byproduct of its recent acquisition of WebDialog.