OpenOffice.org Grows Up
Nine years after Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice, the resulting OpenOffice.org project is ready to roll out its 3.0 release. Enhanced format compatibility and features put it on par with Microsoft Office.
What About Outlook?
Microsoft’s decision long ago to market its Outlook e-mail and calendaring application in with the rest of its Office suite has led most people to expect that all office productivity suites should come along with an Outlook analog. OpenOffice.org has never included such an application in its suite, and this state of affairs has not changed with version 3.
Instead, the OpenOffice.org project is pushing the duo of Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client and Lightning calendaring add-on as its preferred route to replacing Outlook. In my testing of the Thunderbird/Lightning combo, I’ve been pleased overall with the pair’s performance and functionality, particularly regarding the spam filtering duties that Outlook tends to handle poorly.
However, the big problem with Thunderbird as an Outlook replacement is the absence of the Messaging API protocol through which Outlook talks to Exchange. For e-mail, enabling IMAP in Exchange will do the trick, but Lightning does not link up to Exchange’s calendar and task list.
Lightning does support remote calendars exposed through iCal, CalDAV or Sun’s Java System Calendar Server, but the Exchange omission will pose problematic for many businesses, which would do well to remember that there’s no reason why one can’t simply team OpenOffice.org with Outlook.
