Introduction:

Openoffice.org is a business network site wherein one can outsource projects as well as seek projects. It is an international office suite which can be run on any operating system platforms. It is highly sponsored by the Sun Microsystems who maintains the code of projects online. Some of the other contributors are RedFlag, Novell, RedHat, IBM and Google. This software was founded in Germany in mid 1980’s and later was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 who further released it in year 2000. This site is governed by the Community Council who is responsible to solve any conflicts and disputes and provides a forum for authenticating the issues related to the projects.

Features:

All the projects are widely distributed in any of the 3 categories – Accepted Projects, Native – Lang and Incubator. Accepted projects are the ones who have voting rights and incorporate the well being of the communities. There are technical as well as non-technical projects under this category. The in-house native languages projects fall under this category. Incubator are the community sponsored projects, usually has experimental and small term projects. One need not register on this site to get information on the ongoing and new projects posted; however one can subscribe to the mailing lists and can get this information on a regular basis. If you have your own site it let you link to the openoffice.org site thus making it accessible to different community members. To get more information related to this site one can check the useful links available on it.

Tips & Tricks:

The titled tabs make it easier to browse what you are actually looking for.  One can browse the projects category wise or even project lead wise. Most of the projects displayed on this site are hard core technical ones and require good programming ability. One can download the software by selecting the different themes and clip arts available as per your like. To keep you updated with the recent events on Openoffice.com, one can check the News tab and avail all the details. It is very simple to register on this site and ne can save the project details or the pages browsed in their personal folder. There is a dedicated community available if there are any issues related to the project you are working on so that you can report abuse and or any discrimination. One can also make use of the different supports like training, communities, books to further enhance your growth ability on the Openoffice.org

Newbie Friendly Rating:

Though it is a very innovative and aggressive platform available for the techies, the site overall looks plain and crafted only with words. It does not have graphical interface which could have made operating more interesting. With so many business networking sites available online, there is nothing outstanding or exceptional about this site. The only fact which can come handy is that one can find each and every kind of technical project on this site. Openoffice.org can be given a rating of 6 on 10.