Extending Office Suites

Even before Microsoft failed to win the ISO vote, we all knew that the standard itself didn't mean too much. Either Microsoft won the vote and continued its attempts to marginalize competition, or it would lose and it wouldn't have as much of a strong position. But the standard itself is really a small part of the Office Suite Wars. As Linux Loop points out, one of the next big things is office suite extensions.

In English, that means being able to fit your office suite to your particular needs.

LinuxLoop (ibid) points to the OpenOffice Extension repository that has grown considerably since when I first saw it. It may be easier to browse the extensions by specific application. And even with the additions, there wasn't much that was attractive other than the Writer's Tools.

In other words, I didn't see much that I wanted to use. That is simply me - maybe others will find things. What do user's want? For me, I'm satisfied with OpenOffice.org and Seamonkey. I have been for years, and they've both gotten better over time - but what about those people who bought into the Firefox buzz and run a separate client for email? Be it Thunderbird or Outlook, their solution doesn't necessarily integrate with the rest of what they may do.

And then - I have to wonder this openly - why is it that I can't view ODT documents in a browser when I click on them? Why do I always have to fire up OpenOffice.org? It is an Open Standard, right?

I think the next real big thing in extending the Office Suite is actually to be seen in extending web browsers with, at the least, read functionality of the documents. I shouldn't have to fire up OpenOffice.org unless I intend to edit something. Do you know how many pesky PDF files we could get rid of that way?

This is where GoogleDocs seems to have an upper hand, plus the collaborative work possible with GoogleDocs is very useful - there is no denying that. So why not an OpenOffice Server where private groups can run their own servers?

I agree with LinuxLoop. The future of Office Suites is in extending them - but I don't think plugins are the ticket just yet. Give people a means to collaborate outside of the eyes of Google, they may well take it.

Quit staring at the desktop. Start staring at the users.