Microsoft Office rivals advance

New releases are planned from both OpenOffice.org and SoftMaker

Rivals to Microsoft's Office productivity suite are sharpening up their game. The OpenOffice.org community is planning to add reports to its database, while SoftMaker is to extend its productivity line-up with a database, presentation tool and scripting language.

OpenOffice.org has announced plans to enhance its database application, Base, with the addition of a new reporting tool. Report Designer will ship in the next release of the suite and will give users the ability to create sophisticated business intelligence reports from various sources, including Olap and XML, OpenOffice.org said.

Report Designer will be based on a reporting engine from the Pentaho open-source business intelligence project and will output reports as text or spreadsheet files in the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF).

"The new integrated reporting and database connectivity capabilities should be well-received by the millions of OpenOffice.org users around the world," said Sun's director of engineering for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Michael Bemmer.

OpenOffice.org released version 2.2 of its free-to-download suite in March 2007, and the project is currently working to a three-month release cycle, making version 2.3 due by mid-2007. The suite currently runs on Windows, Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X.

Meanwhile, German developer Softmaker announced it is developing three new applications: Presentations 2007, DataMaker 2007 and BasicMaker 2007. The firm already ships a SoftMaker Office suite comprising the TextMaker word processor and PlanMaker spreadsheet.

Presentations 2007 will be fully compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint, yet easier to use and less expensive, SoftMaker said.

DataMaker is aimed at both beginners and experts, and can be used to access databases from MySQL, SQL Server, IBM DB/2, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft Access.

BasicMaker is a scripting language compatible with Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and allows users to write scripts or programs that execute commands in TextMaker or PlanMaker.

SoftMaker Office supports Microsoft file formats and runs on Windows, Linux, Windows CE and Windows Mobile. It costs €69.95 (£48) per seat. The three new applications are still under development and SoftMaker has yet to disclose release dates.