I'm a bit behind in reporting on current events, so this post is by way of a quick cut and paste to update the interview with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreech of OpenOffice.org that I posted on May 13 as part of the continuing series on the Evolving ODF Environment. Look for Part IV of that series on July 5, when I post the interview with German software developer SoftMaker on its own ODF-compliant office suite, called SoftMaker Office.
With that as an uncharacteristically brief prelude, here is the text of the email sent out on Thursday (June 29) by OpenOffice.org, announcing their new release of OOo, and describing its new features, fixes, upgrading information and other details:
All
OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is now ready for download, three months since the release of 2.0.2. This latest release contains a mixture of new features, bug fixes, and security patches, and demonstrates the OpenOffice.org Community's determination to maintain its position as the world's leading open-source office productivity suite.
The security patches fix vulnerabilities that have been found in internal security audits. Although there are currently no known exploits, we urge all users of 2.x to upgrade to the new version or
install their vendor’s patches accordingly. Patches for users of OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 will be available shortly. For details of the security issues fixed, see Security Bulletin 2006-06-29:
* http://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin-20060629.html>
Key features of the new release:
* performance improvements: for example, a 23 percent improvement in certain Calc benchmarks
* further improvements to file format compatibility with Microsoft Office files
* new email integration features for users wanting to send emails in Microsoft file formats
* more control over how exported PDF documents will display when opened in a PDF reader
* support for more languages and improvements in hyphenation and thesaurus
* support for Intel architecture for Mac OS X plus improved Mac OS X System integration
* built-in check for updated versions
OpenOffice.org is also the first office suite to support the ISO approved OpenDocument Format as its native file format. The standard – ISO/IEC 26300 – defines how office documents (spreadsheets, wordprocessor documents, etc.) must be stored so that they can be exchanged with any compliant software package. Its adoption represents an historic “Freedom of Information” breakthrough for the IT industry.
Download OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 now from our volunteer servers. Not all languages may be ready, so check with your favourite Native Language project (http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html).
* http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.3/
If you find the pages too busy, try using our legal peer-to-peer (P2P) system.
* http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/
If you do not have a suitable internet connection, consider buying a CD-ROM from an OpenOffice.org Community Distributor.
* http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/
–The OpenOffice.org Team
For further blog entries on ODF, click here
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(and remember to Buy Your Books at Biff’s)
Tiresome I know, but I think you’ll find it was KOffice that was first with ODF.
Great website BTW
Thanks for the kind words about the Website.
Yes, the various ODF developers are not a shy and retiring lot. One of the interesting things about reproducing the interviews without editing the responses is that readers can not only judge each team by its software, but by its veracity (or lack thereof) as well. As you’ll see with the SoftMaker interview I posted today, they’re starting to respond to each other as well. At the end of the day, we should have a reasonably accurate picture.
– Andy