Open Office just recently released the newest version of their free, open-source office productivity suite, the Open Office 3.0. Needless to say, the launch was a hit. Several millions of users logged on to the company’s website to download the software. The result? Their web servers crashed.
Released yesterday at around 10 am, the servers crashed just a few hours after that. OpenOffice.org uses mirror sites to accommodate all download requests. Even so, their servers proved to be not so powerful enough even to redirect the users to such sites. Not that their web servers are sub-quality. It’s just that the Open Office 3.0 simply is the biggest download ever for the company. John McCreesh, Open Office’s marketing lead, confirmed the server crashing reports first heard from ZDNet.
Open Office 3.0 has some relevant upgrades to their software and those are the main reasons why people rushed to get the newest version. What’s good about the new suite is that it can now be installed on Mac OS X. It is also capable of reading .docx file extensions. The .docx files are OOXML or Office Open XML files created by Microsoft’s software, Office 2007. The new suite also offers a better range of extension integration.
However, the new Open Office still has its limitations. Currently, it isn’t possible to export OOXML documents to the new Open Office software. Users of Open Office can’t send documents to the users of Office 2007 either. The work around is to send the files in the old format.
The high demand for the new version of this free open source software is unprecedented. It only goes to show that people are going for the more viable solution for their office productivity software requirements. Currently, the OpenOffice.org’s website is on simple text layout, if only to accommodate everybody who are trying to get hold of their newest offering.
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