| The many faces of OpenOffice
A chameleon: That's what I think of when I ponder the myriad variations on the OpenOffice.org theme that have cropped up in recent years. Ever since Sun Microsystems decided to release the StarOffice source code into the public domain, ambitious open source developers have been actively tweaking, tuning, and spinning the bits into ever more specialized iterations. And while the majority of these variants have achieved only niche status, a few commercially driven projects have had a direct impact on the broader OpenOffice community. Office-compatibility torture test
In InfoWorld's tests using complex Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability, severely mangling our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files. By stark contrast, SoftMaker Office�showed excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats, making it a safe choice for heterogeneous environments -- at least where external data access wasn�t a priority.�Neither OpenOffice.org nor SoftMaker Office was able to preserve links to an external SQL data source in imported Microsoft Excel documents. (See the review, "The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org.") The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org
In the kingdom of business productivity, Microsoft Office reigns supreme. Its dominating position atop the word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations heap seems virtually unassailable. Its file formats define an industry, and its component applications are often synonymous with the underlying tasks they perform. That's not a presentation file you're displaying -- it's a PowerPoint deck. You don't punch numbers into a spreadsheet; you update your Excel Workbook. And if you're going to send out that memo company-wide, better make sure it's attached as a Word doc. Mozilla launches Firefox 3.5, starts kill clock for older 3.0
Mozilla launched Firefox 3.5 today, ending six months of delays to wrap up its newest browser almost exactly a year after its last major upgrade. NetBeans IDE enhanced for teams, scripting
etBeans, the open source IDE championed by Sun Microsystems, is being fitted with additional capabilities this week for development teams and scripting languages. July Giveaways
Cisco Subnet is giving away 15 copies each of books on Enterprise Web 2.0 and Building a Greener Data Center; Microsoft Subnet is giving away training from New Horizons to one lucky reader and 15 copies of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Unleashed. Entry forms can be found on the Cisco Subnet and Microsoft Subnet home pages. Deadline for entries July 31. Network World on Twitter? You bet we are | 
For better or worse, Nortel as we know it is coming to an end. Here's how the telecom giant got to this point.
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