OpenOffice.org to Get Firefox Extensions and More

I_am_Rambi writes "OpenOffice.org is set to get new features including Firefox-like extensions. From the article: 'Second, and I think that although we have no clear road map for this yet (besides, our version naming scheme is going to change once again ), OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future. Besides the inclusion of those two softs inside the office suite, connectors to Sun Calendar Server and Microsoft Exchange will also be developed accordingly.'"

LJ Talked More About Extensions

[Noksagt]

LinuxJournal ran an article on OpenOffice.org Extensions [linuxjournal.com] a couple of months ago. They link to the project wiki and summarize a few extensions, including a grammar checker, Wikipedia integration, and a blog posting tool.

Questions on Thunderbird/Sunbird Inclusion

[Noksagt]

OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future.

This is an interesting move. I am Thunderbird and Sunbird user, so am not opposed to this change. I certainly know a lot of people were clamouring for Outlook-like functionality and integration for OO.o. I do wonder why these were chosen over Evolution [gnome.org], which is more like Outlook & already has integrated calendaring. I also wonder why Sunbird was selected--while I'm happy with it, it hasn't yet hit a 1.0 milestone. I still use it in production, but I know others avoid it & I think Mozilla would discourage it. And why Sunbird, rather than Mozilla Lightning [mozilla.org], which integrates into Thunderbird?

Finally, Thunderbird seems to release updates more rapidly than OO.o. Does anyone know how updates will work? Will those who installed it through OO.o immediately get Thunderbird updates? Or will they wait until the next OO.o version bump?

Re:Questions on Thunderbird/Sunbird Inclusion

[cynicalmoose]

Moreover, Evolution already has (slightly limited) support for MS Exchange. That's important, because Exchange uses a weird and undocumented version of extended MAPI to interact with clients (i.e. Outlook), which makes building interfaces with it hard. If you want to see Exchange support in Outlook, vote for bug 128284 (bugzilla rejects links from slashdot).

Professional writers

[overshoot]

But then, speaking as a professional writer, there is no possible way in which you could convince me that a WYSIWYG word processor is the right tool for any jobs I have; they are toys for people who have grown out of finger painting, not tools for people who deal with large quantities of text.

I quite agree that if your output is primarily text, you're much better off with LaTeX or the like. Gorgeous results without the constant distraction of formatting.

However, there are a lot of professional writers who have to integrate high proportions of graphics into their work, and for them a WYSIWYG tool is quite appropriate. The ability to restructure a document (the big missing feature in the Navigator) is a serious handicap there.

I'm not a professional writer, I just sleep with one.

Re:Why not Evolution

[shoegoo]

I'd guess another reason for choosing Thunderbird/Sunbird is that they already have working ports on other platforms (granted Sunbird is still not of great quality). The last I heard about the Evolution Windows port was that it was finally compiling...

Re: Exchange support in Mozilla

[bunratty]

On the other hand, if you want Exchange support in Mozilla, vote for bug 128284 [mozilla.org].

Re:Extension I'd like to see

[abigor]

In KDE they are called KParts, and any KDE application can load and use them. For example, spellchecking is used by many apps via a KPart, including the khtml component, which is itself a KPart - so KParts can even use other KParts.

Re:Why not Evolution

[gkhan1]

While this is true, GTK not only looks strange on windows, it even looks quite bad. Let's face it, ported GTK applications are not pretty. They look great on Gnome, simply because that was what they were made for, but on windows...shudder...not so much.