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Massachusetts Open Document Office Applications

Massachusetts' frequently asked questions (FAQ) about state documents lists many office tools that support the OpenDocument file format natively

Massachusetts' frequently asked questions (FAQ) about state documents lists many office tools that support the Open Document file format natively: OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, Abiword, eZ publish, IBM Workplace, Knomos case management, Scribus DTP, TextMaker and Visioo Writer.

The FAQ says:

"Because the Open Document Format is an open standard, it increases the vendor pool available to state agencies by encouraging and permitting vendors not already in this field to develop products that support the standard. Adoption of the Final ETRM Version 3.5 will greatly increase competition among vendors for the sale of office applications to agencies."

OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org is an open source office productivity suite available for major computing platforms in over 60 languages. It's main sponsor and contributor is Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice.org is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL). The latest version, OpenOffice.org 2.0, was released yesterday.

StarOffice

StarOffice 8, from Sun Microsystems, is a commercial office productivity suite with powerful word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database capabilities. Based on open source technology, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice 8 runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems. The suite is comprised of five key components: StarOffice Writer, Impress, Calc, Base and Draw.

KOffice

KOffice is a free integrated office suite for the KDE (K Desktop Environment), a free graphical desktop environment for Linux and Unix workstations, consisting of several applications. It includes a word processor (KWord) and spreadsheets (KSpread) and a presentation application (KPresenter).

Abiword

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

eZ publish

eZ publish is an open source platform for web publishing, e-commerce, intranets, document management, blogs, photo galleries and more.

IBM Workplace

IBM Workplace is a family of products, technologies and solutions for creating innovative, adaptive work environments that can be customized based on users' roles in the organization. IBM Workplace products provide the front-end to IBM's service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy.

Knomos

Knomos is an open source project for the management of the workflow and knowledge basis in law firms and other professional firms.

Scribus DTP

Scribus is an open source desktop publishing (DTP) application for Linux and other flavors of Unix and Unix-like systems, including Mac OS X and soon Windows.

TextMaker

TextMaker is a compact commercial word processor from SoftMaker. It runs on many different operating systems and hardware including: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs, Windows CE.NET. Currently there is a free Windows beta version.

Visioo Writer

Visioo-Writer is a free OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument file viewer. The project is to create a multi-operating system, multi-language, fast and simple to use program, for the smallest possible size.

About Microsoft Office

The state FAQ says:

"The Final ETRM V. 3.5 permits agencies to keep their existing MS licenses as long as the software supporting them includes a method for saving documents in Open Document Format."

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