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OpenOffice Online Goes Beta

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the at-your-service dept.

Stony Stevenson sends word of the beta availability of a software-as-a-service version of OpenOffice 2.3, brought to us by Mandriva Linux creator Gael Duval. According to Ars, this package "easily offers the most features of any online office suite," though it "lacks the collaborative or document-sharing features of competitors like Google Docs or even Microsoft's Office Live Workspace." "To create this feature-rich environment, Online OpenOffice.org requires a modern browser with JavaScript and the Sun Java Runtime Environment version 1.4+ plug-in. The setup has been tested in Firefox 1.5 and above, IE6 and 7, and even Safari, though Ubuntu users are specifically warned that they must be using the Sun Java (Sun JRE) plug-in or the current implementation of Online OpenOffice.org won't work."

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Why would Ubuntu users care? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I mean, good to know, but Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice.org anyway. Without document sharing, I really don't see the point of this...

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  2. Remember Java based C/S StarOffice, anyone? by demon+driver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    About seven or eight years ago, when StarOffice 5.x was still around, shortly after it was acquired by Sun, I remember some Sun/StarOffice guys showing StarOffice as a real client-server version implemented in Java, not as a remote-GUI (VNC) based "normal" app like the one in TFA. The server portion was running on a Solaris server, while the client app ran on any OS; I think they were showing it on OS/2 since the event was a OS/2 users' conference. They claimed to have implemented some kind of sophisticated load balancing between client and server. The functionality was the same as that of the ordinary office suite, the GUI looked not much different and evrerything seemed quite performant.

    For a very short time, German telco Mobilcom used to offer it to their customers as a web-based service.

    I wonder what became of it. The same what became of the vast and really useful feature set that was ripped out of StarOffice 5.x when it was crippled to become OpenOffice 1/StarOffice 6, probably.

    Cheers,
    d. d.