OpenOffice.org: Third Major Release announced, thoughts about the importance of Extensions
The Italian and the English announcements of the third major release of OpenOffice.org yesterday went out, and today the whole OpenOffice.org website is struggling to cope with the demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org.
Here some excerpts of the English press release.
Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) October 13, 2008 — Celebrated at a launch party in Paris today, and just in time for the eighth birthday of the project, the OpenOffice.org Community today announced the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. The third major update of the leading productivity suite delivers significant enhancements and advanced, extensible, productivity tools for all users, including Mac users, as OpenOffice.org now runs natively on the Mac OS X platform.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is more than a simple productivity application. With this release the basic components, which include word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, formula and database capabilities, can easily be supplemented by extensions downloaded from the OpenOffice.org extensions repository. Instead of feature bloat, OpenOffice.org 3.0 gives users in enterprises, offices, schools, as well as home users the freedom to configure their suite their way.
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.
McCreesh, Marketing Project Lead for OpenOffice.org, actually said similar things, as reported by ZDNet co.uk, mentioning OpenOffice 3.0 increased focus on the integration of extensions:
What we are doing is improving the way people can build extensions so, rather than keep on increasing the size of OpenOffice, people can download additional functionality if they particularly need it.
As seen with Funambol, Sun basically retains almost full control of decision making and IP ownership. Despite within the openoffice.org community there are some tension between control and openness, now the OpenOffice.org modular architecture allows subproject creation. And third parties’ extrinsic motivations may vary.
OpenOffice.org migrations are not easy yet, but the state of enterprise applications integrations can change now.
Boycott Novell » Links: OpenOffice.org 3.0 and OpenDocument Format 3:17 pm on October 15, 2008 Permalink
[…] 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. […]