When eWEEK Labs recently reviewed StarOffice 8, we were impressed by its broad platform support and low cost-two measures by which the Sun Microsystems Inc. office productivity suite edges out Microsoft Corp.'s market-leading Office 2003 but falls short compared with its open-source sibling, OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Mad Penguin™ is running the third of three interviews with some of the people who have been hunkered down in endless meetings or hunched over their keyboards to bring us such a splendid, robust, virus-free code base. Today's interview is with OOo community manager, Louis Suarez-Potts.

Programmers released version 2 of OpenOffice.org on Thursday, a major overhaul to an open-source software suite that has recently become a more serious rival to Microsoft Office.

In Part 1, we studied the fundamental concepts of OpenOffice.org's software development kit (SDK) and how the SDK can be used to communicate with the OOo programs. We now are ready to write an application.

This Thursday, the Open Source project OpenOffice presented Release Candidate 1 of its free Office suite; this test version -- possibly the last one -- was, however, already available for downloading from the OpenOffice web site before the official release on Thursday: all of the mirror servers had been prepared since Wednesday.

While some office suite users are still waiting for OpenOffice.org 2.0 to arrive, its parent organization has quietly released OpenOffice.org 1.1.5.

The latest OO.o (OpenOffice.org) boasts several new features. Perhaps the most significant of them is that OO.o now supports the importing of OpenDocument documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

It's a little-known secret, but what you see in the interface of version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org isn't what you have to settle for. Hidden throughout version 2.0 are dozens of pieces of functionality, each available in a few seconds by customizing the menus, toolbars or keyboard shortcuts of OpenOffice.org applications.