Updating open source software

After upgrading the WordPress platform to v2.5, we found the OpenOffice upgrade to v2.4 available and proceeded to complete the upgrade successfully this past week. We are quite pleased with it so far; there are no major additions but there are enough improvements in usage and features to keep me in a positive frame of mind about these products. I have begun using the OpenOffice at work to try these office productivity products in place of the MS Office suite. So far I have been successful; a major issue has been, and continues to be, the ability to share my documents with the staff (and any other interface, actually) who are still on the MS Office platform.

I have added a few important plug-ins (a.k.a. extensions) to make these applications more useful: templates, easy image-cropping, and a wizard that helps one save one’s files in other alternate formats (such as MS Office). There are a number of these enhancements available.

I expect there are improvements in ooBase, the relational data base platform, which will bring it closer to the MS Access product which I am so familiar with.

Today, I loaded the Firefox browser version 3 Beta just for kicks; this is a pre-release public version.