Government's focus on open standards makes good business sense and will help to avoid dependency on commercial software vendors, says [South African] Department of Trade and Industry head of IT security Bob Jolliffe.

This article by Bryan Rasmussen gives a quick overview of how to design an OpenOffice form as an end-user, and provides the syntax for making an OpenOffice XForm match a required XML output format. The article assumes that readers have at least a simple knowledge of XML, XPath, and XML Schema. To follow along or use the downloadable code, you should have OpenOffice version 2.4 or higher installed.

After months of beta testing, IBM (NYSE:IBM) released Lotus Symphony 1, its free productivity suite, earlier this month. Based on an older version of OpenOffice.org (1.1.4, while the suite is currently up to 2.4.1), Lotus Symphony has a slicker interface, uncluttered menus, and a number of user accessibility options that make it a more attractive option than Open Office.