What people are saying about OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org Version 3.3 Launch
Andrew Southworth Network Coordinator, Canadian Labour Congress
“It's never been just about the savings. The Canadian Labour Congress selected OpenOffice.org in support of what it does and how it goes about doing it. It's the full support of the ODF that frees us from committing to any one vendor. And it's the extensions, the enterprise elements and the open-source code that gives all those we represent and work with in Canada, from schools to hospitals to libraries to private sector corporations the freedom of real productivity — without being locked into a particular company's vision of how you should work. Saving money on software is great. But OpenOffice.org, with its support of the ODF, is more than about the bottom line. It's about the freedom to choose the best.”
Lisa Maola Resource Secretary, Sarnia, Ontario, Canada
"Working in a no-cost walk in resource centre specializing in assisting persons with disabilities, OpenOffice.org has provided a high quality, reliable product that enables us to effectively support clients in our community. A true point of difference is that documents can be opened from and saved in any format, thus removing communication barriers and allowing users to maintain their competitive edge. The compatibility of OpenOffice.org to work with proprietary software suites provides all users with flexible options consequently saving time and money."
Ramon Solé CEO at OPS Consulting
"More and more private companys are deploying OpenOffice.org as their corporate office suite. Our business in consulting and support for OpenOffice.org at OPS Consulting [in Barcelona, Spain] has been steadily growing since the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. [Note: As of the release of 3.3, we have seen more than192 million dowhloads of OOo 3.0 --Editor.] We feel the grounds of such a increasing use of OpenOffice.org in the enterprise field are the improved compatibility with MS Office, the incorporation of new features demanded by the business environment and the daily extension of the base of business users, creating a true business ecosystems for OpenOffice.org. We were eagerly expecting the new release 3.3, as we are sure it will speed up even more the adoption rate of the suite in more firms."
OpenOffice.org Version 3.0 Launch
Aslam Raffee Chief Information Officer at Department Science and Technology, Republic of South Africa (bio)
"The South African government adopted the Open Document Format (ODF) as the default format for the exchange of documents. The government also has policy which favours free and open source software wherever possible. In this context, the release of OpenOffice 3.0 is a huge milestone in the journey to make this a practical reality.
"The latest version of OpenOffice is a free software suite which raises the bar for competing open source and proprietary office software products. The ability to read and write ODF documents as well as all significant document formats, combined with the ability to run OpenOffice on all major (and minor) operating system platforms already places this community driven office software suite in a critically important position for us.
"We applaud the efforts of the developers from around the world who have brought huge performance and functionality improvements in this release. Its an outstanding piece of software and available for free under a great licence. I am confident that it meet the needs of most South Africans, its going to be hard for me to justify a government official using any other office suite. I certainly can't justify paying licence fees for one. I am also confident that we will see more of our talented South African developer community contributing to the ongoing effort to ensure that OpenOffice remains the first choice of office suites."
Thomas Wlodkowski Director of Accessibility at AOL (bio)
"As a blind consumer who uses Mac OS 10 to carry out daily office tasks, I was pleased to see the progress that the OpenOffice.org community has made in addressing compatibility with Apple's VoiceOver screen reader. It is reassuring to know that consumers with disabilities will be able to move between computer platforms and enjoy equivalent access to applications that are critical to basic job performance."
Peter Korn Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems and co-chair of the OASIS OpenDocument accessibility subcommittee (bio)
"Sun and the OpenOffice.org community take accessibility very seriously, whether in schools, in the home, in the workplace or in government institutions. An accessible solution for editing documents, spreadsheets, and creating presentations is of vital importance to the hundreds of millions of people worldwide with disabilities.
"We have listened and responded to the community. Our engineering efforts are a direct result of the requests we've received from our user community and exemplifies the innovation and success of the many open source initiatives at Sun."
Jim Parkinson Vice President, Developer, Tools and Services Sun Microsystems Inc. (bio)
"In the 25+ years in the computer industry, I don't know when I was as proud of a product release as I am of OpenOffice.org 3.0. The OpenOffice.org community teams have come together to produce a first-class product. With the new features in 3.0, this sets us part from all other open source productivity packages. One of key parts of this release is MacOSx support, all of the early access feedback have been extremely positive. Also we must mention the many strong additions to extension system for OpenOffice."
Solveig Haugland Consultant, trainer, technical author and OpenOffice.org guru (bio)
"3.0 shows the continuing commitment from OpenOffice.org to providing the features that users consider the most important. I've been impressed with each release, as the features that users ask me for in class keep appearing, and aspects of OpenOffice that I've had to teach workarounds for, keep disappearing. In 3.0, one example of this is the addition of the popular three-up slide handouts layout, with lines for notes by each slide. I've been teaching students how to create this themselves for years, as well as how to find and use the separate window where they need to specify that they want to print handouts. Now, I can skip that lesson entirely, since the layout is already there, and an easy way to print handouts is now available in the main print window. I actually shouted out "Yes!" when I discovered this feature; it's going to save time in the classroom and make slide setup and printing simpler and easier."
OpenOffice.org Extensions
Solveig Haugland Consultant, trainer, technical author and OpenOffice.org guru (bio)
"I am extraordinarily impressed with the Adobe Acrobat-like PDF editing features available in Sun's PDF editing extension. You can delete, edit, and add text; add, edit, delete, move, and resize graphics; add, move, and delete pages; and more. All for free. This is a huge benefit to anyone who produces documents for publication, or organizations like schools and city and state governments that produce documents of any length for the public."
