Currently viewing the tag: "Office productivity suite"
SOON after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, doubts began to surface about the future of OpenOffice.org, the free and open source office productivity suite.
“Don’t count on Oracle to keep OpenOffice.org alive,” Katherine Noyes of PC World warned, saying that the database giant would likely axe support for the free productivity suite and focus development efforts instead on its commercial version, StarOffice.
“Is Oracle quietly killing OpenOffice?” asked Chris Pirillo, who runs the Lockergnome Web site.
COMPANIES that want to save on software licensing costs can get an excellent office productivity suite by using OpenOffice.org, a free and open source alternative to MS Office.
Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, OpenOffice comes with a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation program (Impress) that can read and write files used by MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
A BATTLE is raging over the future of office productivity software, with most of the fighting going on outside the view of ordinary consumers. But obscure as it may seem, the debate over international document standards could determine if governments and companies alike will be able to choose alternatives to MS Office and still be confident that they can send and receive files that anyone else can read.
The battleground is the International Organization for Standardization or ISO, where Microsoft is trying to get its proprietary OOXML file format certified. For reasons that will become apparent, the company refuses to support the Open Document Format or ODF, which is already ISO-certified.
