Oracle Pushes Open Office into the Cloud

Without making any fuss, Oracle Wednesday went into the Cloud Office business in competition with Google and Microsoft.

It's targeting desktop, web and mobile devices. The stuff is supposed to work on Windows, Mac, Linux, web browsers and smartphones.

It says Oracle Cloud Office 1.0 enables Web 2.0-style collaboration and mobile document access, compatibility with Microsoft Office and integration with Oracle Open Office.

It's supposed to offer elastic scaling and on-premise, on-demand or SaaS deployment.

Since it's using OpenOffice or, if it likes Open Office, the stuff is based on the Open Document Format (ODF).

It's also got Oracle Open Office 3.3 - remember, now, it's ticked off some of the OpenOffice following so much they've forked the code into LibreOffice and as another probable irritant Open Office 3.3 includes new enterprise connectors to Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle E-Business Suite, other Oracle Applications and Microsoft SharePoint.

It's supposed to be more stable and compatible with licenses that are up to five times cheaper than Microsoft.

What's really amusing is Oracle promising freedom from vendor lock-in.

Cloud Office Professional Edition and Open Office Enterprise Edition run about $90 a user, with volume discounts available and limited support, Cloud Office Standard Edition and Open Office Standard Edition cost about $50 a user with no support.

From Cloud Computing Journal