Randall C. Kennedy of InfoWorld writes: ...So it was with an eye toward the all-important requirement of seamless interoperability that I evaluated the latest and greatest that the competition has to offer. In the following sections, I take a look at OpenOffice.org 3.1 and SoftMaker 2008 to determine if these suites have what it takes to stage the ultimate palace coup and bring down the king once and for all.

Free download is available at http://symphony.lotus.com

Symphony supports ODF 1.1.

Symphony 1.3 adds support for reading Office 2007 file formats (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX). Other improvements include: better startup performance on the Mac, improved table-of-contents generation, better mail merge, and improved Datapilot feature for data analysis.

Sun has once again reinforced its commitment to the region with the introduction of its Arabic version of StarOffice 9. The comprehensive suite offers a wide array of advanced, extensible productivity tools including word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, and drawing software, which are all now accessible to Arabic users.

The Dutch government program, Netherlands in Open Connection, and the OpenDoc Society cosponsored the two-day ODF “plugfest” at the Royal Library in The Hague, 15-16 June 2009,  where vendors and open source projects were able to test ODF capabilities with each other in real-world, collaborative scenarios. OASIS TC chairs, Bart Hanssens, (ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC), and Rob Weir (co-Chair ODF TC), participated and delivered presentations.  The details are posted here. The 'plug-fest' was notable for the broad participation from industry and open source communities.