In coming months, they hope to ties into the Novell community, given that Novell itself has dropped support of its own portal product. Liferay is basing its bid for penetrating the Novell community on its existing support for Novell e-Directory. And the next release, 4.3, which should be out in mid-year, will focus on scalability and performance enhancements.
As Microsoft prepares the biggest update ever of its ubiquitous Office software suite, it is once again fending off charges of using hardball business tactics to muscle out competitors.
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Massachusetts is not alone in realizing that proprietary document formats pose a problem for cross platform organizations.
"Public administrations and regulated businesses were worried about meeting Freedom of Information requirements if documents were stored in a long-extinct proprietary data format," says John McCreesh, marketing project lead for OpenOffice.org.
The international community has yet to decide on a standard document format, though recent trends see ODF gaining ground. Seven nations (Brazil, France, Germany, Belgium, Croatia, Norway and Demark) have recognized ODF and the need for open standards for all government documents.
Microsoft's intentions notwithstanding, multiple standards mean added headaches for the competition. Rival online productivity suites like Zoho, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which are quickly gaining popularity, and open-source desktop apps Sun Microsystem's OpenOffice all currently support ODF and not OOXML.
"Zoho will have to support both formats and will do it going forward," says Zoho's Raju Vegesna. "While we support standards, we also have to look at practicality."
"If we were to choose a format, we would pick ODF," says Vegesna.
