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Top Notch Winners!
Congratulations to Mozilla's Firefox and Open Office, the two projects that share this year's Open Source Product of the Year Award. Perhaps even more interesting than the fact both of our winners target end users (and not a more technical audience) is the fact that both applications provide viable alternatives to widely deployed Microsoft products.
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Open Office 2.0
Breaking the grasp of Microsoft's hold on the browser market may seem daunting, but OpenOffice.org is in the midst of charting new territory in competing with Microsoft's Office Suite.
In 2000, Sun Microsystems open sourced StarOffice as under the name Open Office. After five years of development, the suite is beginning to make waves as a viable option to the Microsoft Office Suite. In 2005, OpenOffice 2.0 Beta was released. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation tool, and more. Advanced tools such as mail merge, the ability to read and write Microsoft office documents, macro recorders, and Macromedia flash integration are just some of the innovations that have users thinking Open Office is ready for prime time.
The recent decision of the Massachusetts government to standardize their office documents on the OpenDocument standard (implemented by OpenOffice) has undoubtedly provided an opportunity for OpenOffice to build on its recent success. Corporations are beginning to follow suit. Although it may come as a surprise to many that OpenOffice shared the title of Developer.com Open Source Product of the Year, OpenOffice is undoubtedly a worthy recipient of the award.
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OpenOffice 2 Reviews. Office suites Reviews by CNET.