Free Office Suite offers Content Management System Connectivity

If your business is looking to cut costs and reduce licensing fees, you might want to consider cost-cutting alternatives like the free office suite, LibreOffice.  Not only is it feature-packed for a free office suite, it also offers connectivity options for tying into your existing (or future) content management system (CMS).

With their latest release, LibreOffice 4.0, which was just announced, the connectivity options and features this suite provides make it a great alternative to traditional office suites such as Microsoft Office.

Here is a list of some of the features within LibreOffice 4.0:

LibreOffice 4.0 offers a large number of new characteristics, which are listed on this page: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fixes.

• Integration with several content and document management systems – including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others – through the CMIS standard.
• Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
• Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
• Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
• Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
• Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
• Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
• First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.)
• Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files.
• Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).

“LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface,” explains Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Our project is not only capable of attracting new developers on a regular basis, but it also creates a transparent platform for cooperation based on a strong Free Software ethos, where corporate sponsored and volunteer developers work to attain the same objective.”

So if you are in the market for a cost free alternative or a method of reducing your existing licensing fees but still need to retain interoperability with Microsoft Office formats and connectivity with your CMS, you should take a look at LibreOffice and see if it fits the needs of your organization.