If you are looking to enable document collaboration with check-in and check-out of resources and being able to do so from within the Open Office application, then check out O3 Spaces.

This is some reading that I found recently that makes it easier for OpenOffice and Word to exchange files a little more seamlessly. This has become more important as I am consulting in an environment that is a strict MS user – and being able to have documents that open seamlessly in the MS Word [...]