Open-Xchange to launch open-source, browser-based office suite

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Loek Essers.

Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced on Wednesday.

OX Text doesn’t mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company…

"We are not breaking anything and are leaving everything in place," he said. OX Text can edit about 80 percent of a Word document’s elements, and 100 percent of the document survives with the formatting preserved, he said. OX Text allows multiple users to edit a document at the same time, but there are some things OX Text won’t be able to do that can be done in Word. "We don’t do headers or footnotes, no smart art and we don’t have a formula editor," said Laguna. But functionality like header and footer support will be added later, he said…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/open-xchange-launch-open-source-browser-based-office-suite-214882