Following on from my piece on whether OpenOffice.org can do the job I have remembered that OpenOffice.org 3.0 is due for release in September. So—with my comments on 2.3 in mind—let’s see whether the new version will address my needs.

Features
I’ll look at the features given by Sun in a presentation at last years OOoCon and examine whether they’ll be useful for my users. Of course, I’m judging this on a promised feature list rather than an actual product so I won’t be able to judge how well they work.

Personal Information Manager
Sun call this an “Outlook replacement” and it addresses one of the main excuses reasons for not migrating away from MS Office to OOo. Although we use Outlook here it may not be for much longer anyway as I am getting fed up with those oversized .pst files. I am instead looking at some web-based collaboration tools (a topic for a future column me-thinks).

OOXML import
This will come in handy because—even if we migrate to OOo—there are plenty who will continue to use MS Office and we will no longer need to ask them to send it in .doc format. I note it says import and not “import/export” but that’s not a big issue for us.

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