Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has received a US$20 million investment that it will use to expand its development team to speed up feature rollouts for its Web-based office suite, the company announced on Thursday.

The biggest chunk of the money will go into the expansion of the engineering department, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. The office development team, which now consists of 15 people, will be doubled in the next 12 months or so, he said.

Open-Xchange started rolling out a browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents in March. Thus far the company has launched  OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files as well as OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files.

The application was developed by a team of former OpenOffice developers who are now concentrating on new features, Laguna said.

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