London Regional ICT champion

In the news this lately….

Google Pack includes StarOffice 8

Continuing the battle against Microsoft Office with its online Docs and Spreadsheet service, Google has now included a free, non-expiring version of StarOffice 8 in its free Google Pack download suite.

According to Google, the Google Pack version of “StarOffice 8 includes that includes all the major functionality of the paid consumer version, except for the Adabas D database”

Whether Google’s support will be enough to push StarOffice into the mainstream is debatable.

Google, Microsoft and Apple bump up online storage

Google has begun selling additional storage for its Gmail and Picasa photo album . Gmail users can add to their free 2.8GB and Picasa Web albums can expand beyond 1GB with a number of plans ranging from $20 per year for 6GB to $500 annually for 250GB. The additional storage will be made available to Google Docs & Spreadsheets users at a later date. However, storage is limited to content associated with Gmail and Picasa. See here for a discussion on the downside of Google storage.

Likewise, Microsoft has plans to give increase storage capacity of Windows Live Hotmail. For free basic accounts, users will see their storage limit increase to 5GB. Paid-up users of the Plus service will get 10GB.

Apple has also expanded the amount of storage it provides for subscribers to its .Mac suite of Internet services – from 1GB to 10GB – for which it charges £70 per annum.

Mashup Heaven

Google has released a limited beta mashup service – Google Mashup Editor – to compete with Yahoo Pipes. Mashups allow users to combine web data into new applications. See here for a review of Google Mashup Editor and here for comparisons of the two. Meanwhile, over in Redmond, Microsoft has its own mashup service – the oddly named Popfly – in private alpha development. They need to work on the name, if nothing else.

Microsoft SkyDrive launches

Microsoft has released a UK beta version of its new online storage service, SkyDrive, previously known to the world as Windows Live Folders.

• 500 MB of free online storage, available from any computer with Internet access.
• Create personal, shared, and public folders

Microsoft releases new beta Office converters for Mac

Microsoft has released new beta converters for Windows Office documents saved in the Office Open XML (OOXML) format, adding support for PowerPoint.

The new beta converters will enable Office Mac versions v.x and 2004 to open Word (.docx and macro-enabled .docm) files and PowerPoint presentations (.pptx), shows (.ppsx) and templates (.potx). There is as yet no converter for OOXML Excel files.

Apple iWork ’08 – Microsoft welcomes Office file format support
Microsoft has praised the inclusion of Office Open XML (OOXML) file filters in Apple’s office suite iWork ’08, suggesting that it indicates that software developers are adopting the controversial format in preference to the open source Open Document Format (ODF). You can get download the free 30 trial of iWork here.