Responding to pressure customers and governments, Microsoft has announced Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will add support for the Open Document Format (ODF), Portable Document Format (PDF), and XML Paper Specification (XPS).
The OpenOffice.org community released version 2.2 last week, including updates to OpenOffice's word processor, spreadsheet, presentations and database software.
Contrary to claims by the US Department of Defense that Office Open XML might lead to increased security concerns, vendor lock-in and backwards compatibility issues, Microsoft claims that OOXML resolves exactly these issues.
Business intelligence software from Pentaho is to be integrated into the next version of OpenOffice, the open-source application suite.
Open standards allow the National Archives of Australia to store documents and safeguard against hardware, software and OS obsolescence.
Office 2007 continues to be the focus of discussion here at Big Deal, but the most recent crop of reactions to my postings have shifted from the possible nuisance value of interface changes to the potential upside for OpenOffice, the open-source rival to the desktop suite crown.
Michael Meeks is a distinguished engineer at Novell. But his current project may be his toughest yet. He is in charge of tackling interoperability between Novell's OpenOffice.org productivity suite and Microsoft Office. And as with anything relating to Microsoft, this involves more than just technology.
Developers of alternative office software need to place more emphasis on ease of conversion if they ever wish to dethrone Microsoft. We test six office suites in the market.
Sun would like to think it can succeed where others have failedÂÂâ€"in breaking Microsoft's stranglehold on the office productivity marketâ€"by offering a product that's almost as good as Microsoft Office at a much lower price. Do the sums add up?
A group of companies working on Web services specifications is calling for a new standard to handle desktop application documents.
A growing roster of de facto standards is testing the need for bureaucratic agencies and design-by-committee technologies.
Redmond-based group project manager of Microsoft Office, Gray Knowlton, told ZDNet Australia that OOXML provides higher levels of security. "One of the benefits we have with the OpenOffice XML formats is that we know when we read and write and document because we have an XML based representation of what's in that content -- we know what should and should not be there," he said.
Microsoft says it's opening its Office desktop software by adding support for XML--a move that should help companies free up access to shared information. But there's a catch: It has yet to disclose the underlying XML dialect.
The next version of Microsoft's Office software will run only on the latest releases of the company's operating systems, leaving older OS users in the dark.
It's no secret that Microsoft dominates the productivity suite market, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to go.
The organization behind OpenOffice on Wednesday released a trial version of one of the first major updates to the free open-source office software. A beta release of version 1.1 of OpenOffice is available now from OpenOffice.org.
Developers of alternative office software need to place more emphasis on ease of conversion if they ever wish to de-throne Microsoft.
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