Vietnam's Communist Party plans to switch its 20,000 desktop computers nationwide to open-source software next year, avoiding problems with copyright infringement, state media said Friday.

When you think about office suites, two names come to mind: Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. Although the vast majority of Linux users depend upon OpenOffice for their office needs, the alternatives should not be overlooked.

The free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org might be a killer app for many, but its inability to properly display documents created in the proprietary Microsoft Office formats hinders its widespread acceptance in multi-OS business environments with many legacy .doc and .xls files.

IBM calls its new office productivity suite, built upon OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony. This disappoints two groups. The first group, fans like me of OpenOffice, wish it kept the OpenOffice name to help further the open cause. The second group wishes the old Lotus Symphony office suite, an early competitor to Microsoft Office, had climbed out of the grave.

Microsoft declared yesterday (May 21st, 2008) that Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 would include (among others such as PDF 1.5, PDF/A and some more) built-in support for OASIS OpenDocument Format version 1.1 (finalized, submitted to ISO, supported by OpenOffice.org, Kofffice, GNOME office apps and their forks) while ISO-submitted OOXML support would wait for Office 14.
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The Brazilian government has signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities. The letter asserts that the ODF standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the government.

In May 2005, the head of the Office for Computerizing Cuban Society, Roberto del Puerto, announced that the government was preparing for its central administration offices to switch to the free GNU/Linux system, which uses the Linux kernel written by Linus Torvalds of Finland in 1991. A national group was formed for this purpose.

Nobody disputes that Microsoft Office is king of the hill in office suites, but if you put marketing and market share aside, how does OpenOffice.org compare?

Like it or not, one of the most important features of any Microsoft Office alternative is being able to read Microsoft Office files.