The next generation office suite

That said, there is some truth in a comment recently posted by Jeff Waugh:

This statement is, perhaps, not entirely true; OpenOffice has, for example, been a big part of the push toward the Open Document Format. The open format push has most certainly shifted the battle, to the point that even Microsoft has had to respond. Beyond that, however, it is hard to point to a long list of new things which OpenOffice has brought to the office productivity arena. It is mostly a good copy of that other office application.

Critics of free software are fond of claims that the community is restricted to imitating developments done in the proprietary world. Free software, it is said, is not where innovation is done. To a great extent, OpenOffice could be said to validate that claim. It is not clear that this situation can change; OpenOffice is a large and intimidating code base which can be hard to contribute to, and the project's mission would seem to argue against the creation of surprising new features.

The community is not limited to OpenOffice, however. Jeff's posting points to a weblog entry by Marc Maurer, wherein he (by way of a large Flash file) demonstrates the long-anticipated collaborative editing addition to AbiWord. Authors, connected by the net, can simultaneously work on the same document and see each others' changes as they happen. Now every document can be written by committee, a process known to produce superior results.

Seriously, however, there are clear advantages to being able to work in this mode. Perhaps the tiresome process of sending document files around as attachments and trying to integrate changes from others could eventually fade away. And the world has shown, many times, that if people are given new ways to communicate and work together, they will do surprising things with that capability. So this addition to AbiWord (hopefully due to show up in the 2.6 release) is a welcome step forward.

Meanwhile, the KDE project recently held a "GUI and functionality design competition" for KOffice 2. the results of this competition have now been posted; they show that a number of smart people are thinking about where KOffice could go from here. The winning entry [PDF] from Martin Pfeiffer takes a long look at how people work with documents. His ideas, if realized, could take much of the tiresome clicking out of the editing process and make the task of putting together documents (especially large ones) much more straightforward and fun.

The fact that much effort in the free software community has gone into the replication of features available elsewhere is not particularly surprising. If one wants to build a user community for a software package, one is well advised to provide the capabilities that the target users have come to expect. In many areas, however, that goal has been met, and the time has come to move into new capabilities that users do not - yet - expect to find. By many accounts, office suites are one of those areas. We have the capabilities that most users need; it will be fun to watch as developers create features that users do not yet know that they need.