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Just in time for its (and my) birthday, OpenOffice.org 3.0 was officially released today, after several builds had been found on the FTP sites several weeks before.
The open source community greeted the OpenOffice.org release like they do most others: they crashed the site, forcing Sun to throw up a temporary download-only splash page. The mirrors are also crashed, with many download speeds in the kilobyte range. Luckily, there's a great press release detailing all the important stuff that you need to know while you're waiting.
What's new (the important stuff)
The press release notes several new changes. Arguably, the biggest one (and the one highlighted the most in the press release) is native Mac OS X support, potentially eliminating the need for NeoOffice at all. No more is X11 needed; Mac OpenOffice.org users can now run their favorite office suite with full Cocoa and Aqua support. Many have rejoiced over the news, including Leo Laporte, MacNN, and CrunchGear.
Another big upgrade is the new extension repository. While extensions were always supported, 3.0 marks the first time Sun has actually pushed them towards the community, similar to Mozilla's Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird add-ons. Part of the reason Firefox is so popular is that it has so many add-ons available, many performing invaluable tasks not found in other browsers (Greasemonkey, SiteAdvisor, Stylish, and AdblockPlus are just a few examples). Right now, I could care less what word processor I use. With OpenOffice.org extensions on the rise in 3.0, that might all change.
The last major upgrade is better support for file formats. OOXML, Microsoft's proprietary new format in Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), is finally supported, as is Access' .aacdb. "Improved support" for VBA macros is also available in the latest release. Additionally, you can now edit PDF and MediaWiki documents using OpenOffice.org's great word processor. As the marketing project co-leader noted, "it's even easier to make the change away from legacy MS Office software".
What's new (the not so important, but still nice-to-know, stuff)
The release also has several other interesting things of note. OpenOffice.org's zoom tool has finally been upgraded (officially, a "new slider control for zooming which allows multi-page display while editing". In reality, a 21st Century zooming tool). Notes capabilities are also a powerful new feature. Outside of the word processor, Calc (the spreadsheet Excel-like program) now sports up to 1024 columns per sheets and comes with a great new collaboration feature. Additionally, OpenOffice.org claims to sport a "new way of supporting additional languages", making monolingualism a thing of the past.
Conclusion
OpenOffice.org's release will definitely positively impact the open source community. With all the new features, native support for OS X, and full file format support, Microsoft better look over its shoulder.
