Last night (November 19th) the KOffice team announced the third beta release of the upcoming KOffice 2.0 open source office suite for KDE (K Desktop Environment) users, and not only. This new beta introduces improvements in all its components, such as Karbon, Krita, KPlato, KChart, KPresenter, KSpread, KWord, the KOffice libraries, and plug-ins. It also repairs many of the issues related to the non-translatable strings, and improves the layout of many dockers.

International Business Machines Corp., working to win users away from Microsoft Corp.'s Office programs, adapted its free word processing and document software for use with Apple Inc.'s Macintosh and the Linux operating system. IBM's Lotus Symphony program, released in May, is now available for the Mac and a version of Linux called Ubuntu, Armonk, New York-based IBM said today in a statement. The software can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

IBM and Sun Microsystems today announced the launch of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project organized to make document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business. The ODF Toolkit will use an initial software code contribution from Sun to provide developers with an easy-to-use Application Programming Interface (API) for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents while accelerating additional application development.

IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Google, Novell, Red Hat, US Department of Defense, Belgian Fedict, South Africa Dept of Science and Technology, and others collaborate to deliver true data interoperability for office applications.

OASIS has formed a new group to help implementors create applications that conform to ODF. The new OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance (OIC) Committee will work to ensure that the growing number of ODF-compliant applications are able to interoperate and conform to the standard.

Members of the OASIS ODF Adoption TC and the new OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC will meet and participate in a full day workshop on November 6, 2008 in Beijing.

Confirmed participants include: