• OpenOffice.org 3.0 now in a browser with Ulteo!

The latest and full featured version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available through Ulteo.com using a web browser with a single click of a mouse. No download or installation process of the productivity suite is required.

• OpenOffice.org and archiving

At the ODF Workshop last week, a number of the delegates were asking about the right way to handle archiving of their documents. Obviously ODF offers a baseline file format that promises long-term readability and editability, but the question remains of how best to handle files. With the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0, there are now two alternatives, and we heard at the conference of a third alternative coming in the future from ODF.

• ODF @ OOoCon 2008

Although the focus of the conference is OpenOffice.org, the program, the developers, the translators, promoters and users, there is also a natural overlapping interest in OpenDocument Format (ODF). Because of this, OOoCon typically is also the largest ODF conference of the year, at least based on number of ODF-related sessions.

• Office without the MS

I never took to MS Office 2007.

Having used earlier versions of MS Word for years, I was frustrated when I couldn’t easily find the menus or commands where they used to be on its newfangled ribbon interface. I also disliked that its applications wrote by default to a file format that was unreadable by earlier versions of MS Office.

So this week, when I heard that a new version of my favorite free MS Office replacement, OpenOffice, would be released, I greeted the news with some reservations.

• OpenOffice.org: Third Major Release announced, thoughts about the importance of Extensions

I like the Italian press release more, and it is not just because I am the Institutional Relationship Manager for the Italian OpenOffice.org association and a member of the Italian OOo marketing team. We stressed the importance to be a serious challenger for Microsoft in the Italian market, providing also some numbers (3.580.000 downloads so far this year, one every 7 seconds). We highlighted also that the OpenOffice.org architecture allows third parties contributions, knowing that many are not familiar with the notion of extensions yet.