OpenOffice.org has been released in version 3.0, which brings a lot of new features, including MS Office 2007 import filters. Worth a try if you're using or evaluating OpenOffice.org!

The interviews of the speakers at the Profoss event on "OpenOffice.org in the enterprise" have been published.

Read the interviews of

• Eric Descamps, Project manager at the belgian Post
• Machtelt Garrels, co-founder of OpenDoc Society Belgium,
• Roberto Galoppini

Marseille is looking to deploy OpenOffice.org, and has published a call in the publication for tenders for government projects.

This is one more business opportunity around OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice 2.4 is now available with new features in all components.
The website design has also been overhauled.

With version 3.0 of its suite, OpenOffice will make the switch to the GPLv3. There's also the move from the Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) to the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), easing the hosting of source code of extensions. Let's hope it will help solve some problems of the past.

As seen reported by The 451 Group.

OpenOffice released an important security problem affecting all versions before 2.3.1, and more specifically the database component. The HSQLDB database engine "can be exploited to execute arbitrary static Java code via a specially crafted database document". All users are urged to upgrade.

The Observatoire du Logiciel Libre published its latest report on the Free and Open Source software market in the enterprise, based on training organised for professionals. Although the conclusions cannot be considered as definitive because based on only one company providing trainings, the data unveiled can be used as one indicator of what is currently going on in the market.

The report is in french, but here are the trends comparing the first half of 2007 with the same period in 2006:

• The number of people trained rose 20%. The LAMP stack is still very popular, but the growth of Linux training slowed (+1% only), and the report attributed this to the arrival of Windows Server 2003.
• the trainings delivered become broader, becoming less technical, with for example trainings for SugarCRM and Jaspersoft's reporting solutions.
• Mysql, part of the LAMP stack, keeps growing with 40% more people trained
• Java is still popular, with a progression 66% more people trained
• Postgresql trainings number is stable. Postgresql seems to be used in more established companies and by specialists, relying on its most advanced features like PostGIS.
• the number of trainings delivered about OpenOffice stumbled by 80%. The report mentions that a lot of companies a getting OpenOffice directly, without trainings.

The last point would be worth further investigation: are companies really interestedin OpenOffice without trainings? Or do they have internal experts who deliver training inside the company?

Source: Toolinux

IBM today released the beta version of Lotus Symphony, a productivity software containing a text processor, and spreadsheet and a presentation software. It working with OpenOffice's ODF format, but can read Microsoft Office files. This software is based on Eclipse' Rich Client Platform.

Will it be easier for this Eclipse based Office Suite to break into the entrerprise than it has been for OpenOffice/StarOffice? What's the added value of this proprietary software compared to OpenOffice, which is also backed by IBM? Will it bring some additional support to the Open Document Format? Time will tell, but the answer aren't very clear at the moment....

This 2.3 version of OpenOffice contains amongst other additions, a new charting component and better support for multilingual documents.

There's been quite some controversy around the standardisation efforts from Microsoft about its Office XML formats, but for outsiders, practical illustrations of what was wrong was hard to find. This is over now with a practical study, with real examples from Stéphane Rodriguez. It is surprising to see stored values different from the values actually entered in a product as Exel.