This week saw the International Standards Organisation vote on adopting Office Open XML as a standard for office documents. KDE gained a representative late last year through our legal body KDE e.V. realising that the only way to ensure a fair process was to be part of it. Today our delegate voted yes to adopting the format as an international standard. "We have studied the standard hard and many changes have been made to it," said KDE's Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo "and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source we realised the market should decide the best formats to use, not technical bureaucrats".

A couple of weeks ago Hans Bakker, who had never touched KOffice code before, started hacking on a Krita plugin for the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. Within a week or two he had a working plugin for Krita and it quickly became clear how cool these little devices are and how many possibilities for new user interaction paradigms they afford.

KOffice 2 Alpha 6 has been released. This preview release improves the OpenDocument infrastructure, adds snap guidelines to several applications and sees major improvements in Krita, Karbon & KPlato. See the changelog for more details. Download it from source or get the packages for Kubuntu or openSUSE.

Announcing itself today is KOfficeSource GmbH, a
company that will sell services around KOffice. The founders comprise a small group of
members of the developer community, as well as outside talent. They share an interest in furthering KOffice by supporting it
commercially in addition to the non-commercial support that can be
found on the mailing lists and IRC. As the name suggests
it has been created in Germany but will operate across Europe and further afield.

Immediately after the release of KDE 4.0 RC1, the KDE office suite KOffice today announced the release of version 2.0 Alpha 5. As with the previous alpha versions of 2.0, this is a technology preview more than a version for users to test out. Nonetheless there are some exciting new features and developments here. Read on for more information.

KOffice, the office suite built on KDE technology and in the KDE Communtiy has recently
gotten a lot of press, but is still often underrepresented. In this interview, some key KOffice developers tell us about the recent progress of KDE's Office suite, about Open Standards and how KOffice plays an active role in bringing Freedom to users. We have talked to Boudewijn Rempt, developer of Krita, core KOffice contributor and KOffice release manager, as well as to David Faure who has been taking part in the OASIS, the organization that is responsible for advancing the OpenDocument (ODF) standard.

This weekend, ten KOffice hackers congregated once again in the
hospitable Berlin KDAB headquarters. KOffice has come a long way in
six months: all the groundwork has been laid for the new version, KOffice 2.0. From
Krita to KPresenter, KWord to KSpread, KChart to Karbon, KPlato to Kexi, and from KFormula to Kivio, the big underlying frameworks are ready. This meeting was called to decide on common look
& feel issues and a release plan and schedule.

With an avalanche of last-minute commits, the KOffice Google Summer of Code students finished yet another great Summer of Code. We had some very exciting projects this year, and most of them were as great a success as last year. Read on for details of the achievements.

The KOffice team today released the third minor release of the 1.6 series. As the development focus has shifted to the next major release, this new version was aimed at polishing and fixing bugs. With this new version, three new languages are added to the list of translations: Bulgarian, Low Saxon and Nepali. You can read more about it in the full announcement. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and openSUSE.

KOffice, the KDE office suite, has always stood behind the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as an industry standard. Now with KOffice 2.0 around the corner, with OpenOffice.org quickly becoming a new leader, and with Microsoft to release its own so-called "open" format, ODF and the interoperability that it promises is more important than ever. The KOffice developers will meet in Berlin during the weekend of May 12th-13th to do as much ODF-centered development as possible. Read more to find out what this can mean for KDE at large.