Serdar Yegulalp writes on Information Week, OpenOffice.org's first release candidate for version 3.0 hit the tubes yesterday. It's an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, edition of the open source office suite. It isn't to OO.o 2 what, say, Office 2007 was to Office 2003 -- but it's solid, and most importantly, noticeably faster.

You can generate XForms in OpenOffice from sample input -- as long as you're aware of the technique's limitations. A previous article on XForms in OpenOffice showed how to create a simple XForm in OpenOffice. The introduction to this particular technology came while working on the Danish UBL project, which needed a cross-platform implementation for some of the twenty-three (23) UBL 2.0 document types intended for use by small businesses. The project initially supported only three types: Invoice, CreditNote, and Order, but had a stated goal of supporting all the UBL formats.

The core WordPerfect Office applications support an impressive range of file formats, including Open Document Format (ODF), the very oldest WordPerfect versions, and a few ancient Microsoft Office formats (Word for DOS, anyone?) that even Microsoft doesn't support anymore. Most important, WordPerfect Office can open the latest XML file formats from Office 2007 (those with the -x extensions, like .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx).

Mac fans will soon have access to Mac-native versions of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, two free alternatives to Microsoft Office. Both are based on the same code base, though StarOffice isn't licensed as open source. Sun's Louis Suarez-Potts explained the key differences to TMO and what the customer should know before selecting one or the other.

We are pleased to announce the last beta version of the next version of our open document library.

jOpenDocument 1.1 beta 3 is available for download. It includes a new API for metadata manipulation, full support of measure units, row duplication improvements, XML validator and various API improvements.

jOpenDocument is the most advanced java library for document creation and manipulation.