OpenOffice Extension Support Coming

September 25th, 2006: While it has gained the attention of many governments and organisations through its philosophy and OpenDocument file format, OpenOffice.org has not to date enjoyed the same enthusiastic take up that Firefox has. This could be set to change, however, as the next version of the open source office suite will, like its web browsing brother, include plug-in extension support.

By enabling plug-in support, OpenOffice is essentially opening the doors to developers of all sizes, helping them to create enhancements for the open source office suite, without forcing them to sift through the code to do it.

All a core developer will have to do now, is create a script that hooks into OpenOffice. This could have big implications for developers who do not want to wait around for specific functionality. If something they want is missing in a release, they will be able to add it with ease.

While OpenOffice can already use some extensions, the new version will support OXT, a format that enables extensions to be written in a number of different programming languages. This enables much greater development flexibility, management and configuration than has been possible to date.

As a competitor to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice is yet to have any real impact. However, support, like OpenOffice’s features and usability, is steadily growing.

The update is expected to be released sometime this week, however, while it has every hope that the new feature will spur growth like it did Firefox, the foundation is more realistically saying that it could make OpenOffice a more interesting and compelling platform. It is after all, far easier to switch browsers than office suites.

Comment on this story