Open-Xchange has around 70 million users through its contracts with roughly 80 providers such as 1&1 Internet and Strato. Its OX App Suite takes the form of a virtual desktop of sorts, that lets users centralize their email and file storage accounts and view all sorts of documents through a unified portal. However, as of an early April release it will also include OX Text, a non-destructive, collaborative document editor that rivals Google Docs, and that has an interesting heritage of its own.

The team that created the HTML5- and JavaScript-based OX Text includes some of the core developers behind OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office that passed from Sun Microsystems to Oracle before morphing into LibreOffice. The German developers we’re talking about hived off the project before LibreOffice happened, and ended up getting hired by Open-Xchange.

“To them it was a once in a lifetime event, because we allowed them to start from scratch,” Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna told me. “We said we wanted a fresh office productivity suite that runs inside the browser. In terms of the architecture and principles for the product, we wanted to make it fully round-trip capable, meaning whatever file format we run into needs to be retained.”

This is an extremely handy formatting and version control feature. Changes made to a document in OX Text get pushed through to Open-Xchange’s backend, where a changelog is maintained. “Power” Word features such as Smart Art or Charts, which are not necessarily supported by other productivity suites, are replaced with placeholders during editing and are there, as before, when the edited document is eventually downloaded. As the OX Text blurb says, “OX Text never damages your valuable work even if it does not understand it”.

“[This avoids] the big disadvantage of anything other than Microsoft Office,” Laguna said. “If you use OpenOffice with a .docx file, the whole document is converted, creating artefacts, then you convert it back. That’s one of the major reasons not everyone is using OpenOffice, and the same is true for Google Apps.”

OX Text will be available as an extension to OX App Suite, which also includes calendaring and other productivity tools. However, it will also come out as a standalone product under both commercial licenses – effectively support-based subscriptions for Open-Xchange’s service provider customers – and open-source licenses, namely the GNU General Public License 2 and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, which will allow free personal, non-commercial use.

You can find a demo of App Suite, including the OX Text functionality, here, and there’s a video too:

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After all, it’s not as if office suites are playing center stage in technology innovation. Not even Microsoft, which has owned the office productivity suite market for decades, has bothered to release meaningful changes to the desktop version of Office this century. So why should we expect more from The Document Foundation?

Supporters will likely cite Microsoft’s dominance as the very reason to look elsewhere for innovation. Indeed, The Document Foundation has declared its aim to channel innovation back into the office productivity market:

The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market.

Perhaps. But why start from the paradigm of 1980s technology? Nothing on the Foundation’s new website, or in any of its press materials, suggests that the Foundation’s purpose is to do anything more than free OpenOffice development from the control of one company, Oracle. There’s no discussion of the possibilities of integration with the web. Screenshots look an awful lot like the OpenOffice suite that LibreOffice claims to leave behind.

This isn’t surprising, given that the new LibreOffice has only recently divorced itself from OpenOffice, not to mention the Foundation’s own proclamation that it’s not looking to fork OpenOffice, but rather for “continuity” with its OpenOffice past. Given that it starts from the same client-heavy code base and mentality, how can it hope to truly liberate OpenOffice from the shackles of the desktop on which it was born?

If anyone is advancing the office productivity market, it’s Google Apps  or Zoho Office, which were born on the web. It’s unclear what a web-light, client-heavy Microsoft Office clone can hope to achieve in terms of real innovation. And why are we worried about replicating Microsoft Office functionality, which has long been the aim of the OpenOffice community? While some Excel spreadsheet jocks may live in Microsoft Office, very few of the rest of us give it more than a cursory glance on a regular basis. It’s not that we’re not engaged in “office productivity,” either. We just work differently now.

We email. We SMS. We Facebook. We IM. Or perhaps we crop photos in iPhoto  or make movies in iMovie. What we don’t do, or rarely do, is open a Word document to create a stale relic of communication. Business moves too fast these days to open attachments. Again, yes, there are people who live in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But these people are not you, most of the time.

Real innovation today is occurring at the intersection between cloud data and client-side code, as TripAdvisor demonstrates. And it’s happening in the very definition of rich-client applications, as such applications become more mobile and more web-friendly through the innovations of Strobe Inc. and others.

In short, there are far better uses of The Document Foundation’s developer talents than replicating Microsoft’s tired Office legacy. I think a better OpenOffice is a worthy goal, and support that. After all, enterprises will rely on Office and documents for years to come, even as they keep the green-screen terminals around to support outdated applications.

But the future belongs to the web, and The Document Foundation’s very name suggests a backward-looking focus, not the future focus that will keep it relevant. The web is built upon open source, and many of its most interesting innovations have arisen from the open-source community. I’d love to see The Document Foundation help move the conversation around “documents” to the web that is supplanting the need for relics of the way we once worked.

Note: My company, Canonical, supports The Document Foundation. The views expressed here are completely my own.

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Open Office comprises of several applications: a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation package (Impress), drawing app (Draw), and database tools (Base).

Some of the features heralded in the new release include:

• A new splash screen upon launch (see above)
• The ability to import Microsoft Office (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and Office 2007/Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) files (though it still isn’t possible to save to these formats)
• Support for sharing Excel workbooks
• Support for Excel sheets with up to 1024 columns
• A solver component for solving optimization problems
• Better polished crop and drawing tools
• The display of multiple Writer pages while editing
• Inclusion of Office commenting / change tracking in the document margin
• Some support for Visual Basic macros (a feature dropped by the Microsoft Office team)
• Enhanced support for PDF exporting, including password protection
• Support for Open Office extensions, allowing further features to be created by developers (similar to Firefox)
• No more reliance on X11

Open Office 3.0 is completely free to download and try out. If you are struggling with the Open Office site being overwhelmed with requests for the new software, it’s worth trying this mirror. Installation is far simpler than in previous versions and you can be up and running in a few minutes.

Let us know whether you’ll be switching from Microsoft Office!

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All-in-all, there are some pretty neat enhancements, including:

• support for Microsoft Office 2007 OOXML files
• a much improved presenter interface (for slideshows)
• the ability to import and edit PDF files (via an extension)
• PDF/A export support along with PDF encryption options
• much better integration with MySQL databases
• a calendar extension (requires Thunderbird), finally providing StarOffice with the beginnings of an Outlook competitor
• a blogging & wiki publishing components (additional extensions)
• charting and “Solver” additions to Calc
• a new extension framework (allowing you to roll your own)

I had time to try the Microsoft document support and enhanced PDF import & export and was greatly impressed. You edit PDF files in Draw (kinda makes sense) and can do minor manipulations very easily (though the formatting may not always carry over 100% in the beta). I wanted to try the weblog publisher, but it kept hanging StarOffice each time I tried loading the extension (I can, as a result, report that document recovery works perfectly!).

Since it’s beta, Sun would appreciate feedback you can post your experiences/problems to:

• General Discussions for feedback about all findings around StarOffice 9 Beta
• Installation for feedback about StarOffice 9 Beta Installation issues, and
• Extensions for feedback about StarOffice 9 Beta Extensions

StarOffice 8 is currently listing for $69.95USD, so we can probably expect version 9 to be around that price (which is substantially cheaper than Microsoft Office).

If any TAB readers are heavy Calc users or manage to try out the new Impress or blogging/wiki/Outlook features, drop a note in the comments! TAB should have a full review of the finished product once it’s released.

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Welcome To Aqua

The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads, even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece. Where the X11 interface felt choppy and looked…like an X11 interface, OO 3.0 definitely looks and feels like a fully integrated Aqua application, with menus being very responsive and keyboard shortcuts working (mostly – hey, it’s beta) as expected. How does each behave in this newly integrated world? Let’s take a look.

Writer

Whether it be your latest manuscript, research paper or basic flyer Writer definitely has the tools you need to get the job done. Complex header/footer arrangements, full table of contents manipulation, floating frames and more make this a very sophisticated word & document processor.

I do a great deal of legal document markup and the new notes feature keeps OO 3.0 on track with Pages and Word:

I also especially liked the font preview option for the font menu:

The multi-page layout view mode makes it very easy to see if the visual flow of your document is to your liking:

And, it was refreshing to see a “preview” mode that wasn’t just a export-view to Preview.app:

However, this is also where my first beta bug reared its ugly head with a half-dup of the menubar:

Writer also has basic support for VBA macros, something which neither Pages nor Word 2008 can claim and a feature which came in extremely handy this past weekend for a document I absolutely needed to work with (I could have VMware’d or Boot Camp’d into XP, but OO 3.0 made it so I didn’t have to). That same document also had many form-fields which all worked flawlessly in Writer.

When saving my document, doing so in Microsoft Office compatibility mode produced documents that worked flawlessly on Word 2008 and Word 2003/2007 (on Windows). Importing Microsoft’s new XML-format documents also worked well, though mine aren’t complex by any stretch of the imagination.

Writer is a fine tool, but there are still multi-platform quirks, like the button rendering in some dialogs:

and a less-than Mac-like preferences system:

Calc

I’ll state up-front that I hate spreadsheets. I hate them mostly due to the fact that people use spreadsheet programs as page-layout tools rather then as number crunchers. Numbers understood this and makes no attempt to hide that it is first-and-foremost a way to make pretty, numerical pages. But, getting back to the topic at hand…

Calc is a clear mimic of Excel 2003 for Windows, complete with charting and “solving” capabilities (which the developers are quick to point out do not exist in Excel 2008). Not being a non-work spreadsheet geek (and, I can’t use work examples) I Googled for filetype:xls and pulled a pseudo-random document to work with (the one pictured above). You can see what that Excel document looks like in Excel 2008 just for comparison:

The formatting is pretty much identical and, as a result, I decided to extend my test by checking out Calc’s new charting capabilities:

and then saving in compatibility mode and re-opening in Excel 2008:

I was truly impressed by just how well the two programs worked together, making me a bit more confident if I ever have to use OO 3.0 to edit/share docs with others. I did not have an opportunity to test the new collaboration (i.e. track/merge) feature.

Impress & Draw

With Keynote I have little need for alternate presentation software, but Impress worked as well as previous versions and I did create and preview a quick presentation with no issues:

Similarly, while I have no real need for Draw, it was trivial to create basic line-art documents with this tool:

Database

While it may not have a catchy name like FileMaker (although one could argue that is equally as utilitarian a name) or Bento (I promised myself I would not take this review as an opportunity to trash Bento), OO 3.0′s “Database” application fills a void that exists in Microsoft Office on the Mac and that has been missing in general from the open source world.

The built-in field sets and templates in Database made it trivial to setup a quick recipe database with entry form. And, best of all, I just used the defaults. If I wanted to make it more attractive, I could have spent as much time as necessary crafting primary keys, adjusting field sizes, adding font labels and customizing each feature of the forms. It may be worth it just to keep OpenOffice.org 3.0 around just for the Database program.

The true power of Database comes with full integration into the OO 3.0 suite. I can use the recipe database (if I populate it) to have Writer make a nice recipe file (Database reports could do this as well). Database also allows for data export as well, so you are definitely not locked into the program.

Odds & Ends

Some features spread across the individual components and others were just noteworthy or interesting. For example, when comparing the PDF export feature in Calc, it wound up creating a smaller file than the OS X “print to PDF” option and created table of contents labels based on the spreadsheet tab names.

OO 3.0 also provides a decent number of templates to choose from when starting a new document, some of which aren’t obvious from the flashy “welcome” dialog or just casual interaction with the program (like the full XML document editor).

The help system is very robust and can assist you in pinpointing where to find the functionality you just know is there (like how to mimic Word’s “different first page” feature).

OO 3.0 provides no AppleScript dictionary, so scripters are once again relegated to GUI scripting and the UI – while integrated well with Aqua and with decent Universal Access support – is definitely showing its age. The beta outright crashed on me several times as well, but it confirmed the rock solid document recovery capabilities of the program.

I can say, honestly, that the final version of the software will take its rightful place in my Applications folder, if only to have the ability to deal with the occasional VBA-based document that comes my way and to make use of the Database program.

If you’ve tried OO 3.0 beta or are one of the developers for it, drop a note in the comments with your take on the software and any tips or advice on using the various components. Remember to submit bug reports if you do test the beta and find some quirks. You can also grab a slew of test cases which will cover more of the functionality than I have in this post.

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