This is the ASUS Eee 701 PC. Acting on the suggestion of a colleague, just before Christmas I slipped into a Toys ‘R Us store, handed over £219 (£186.38 ex VAT) and came home with a smartest little machine I’ve seen in ages. It’s a Linux box configured for the school-kid market (hence […]

Peter Sayer, of IDG News Service reports on BECTA’s considered opinion of Microsoft Vista:
British schools should not upgrade to Microsoft’s Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) said in a report on the software. It also supported use of the international standard ODF (Open Document Format) […]

Techcrunch covers the latest beta release of Office Live, called Workspace, which is Microsoft’s attempt at an online collaborative environment. Think Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Anyway, they weren’t impressed:
The big surprise is that Office Live Workspace includes a decent online word processor called Web Notes that is comparable in most ways to other Web-based alternatives. […]

This is interesting:
The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.
The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.
It says talks with Microsoft have not resolved “fundamental concerns” about academic licensing and about Office 2007 and the Vista operating system…
It’s no so […]

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Two years after announcing a somewhat vague software-distribution partnership, Google Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have clarified their tactics for jointly attacking Microsoft Corp. and its ubiquitous Office software.
Over the weekend, Google quietly began including Sun’s StarOffice suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of […]

Before you submit articles to scientific journals, it might be worth having a look at this from Rob Weir…
It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news […]

Apple Mac users might be interested in this:

Mac users waiting for a native version of OpenOffice.org might see it sooner than they might have thought, now that Sun has thrown its support behind the project.Sun’s Philipp Lohmann announced on his blog this morning that Sun will help with the port of OpenOffice–the open-source version of […]

Lifehacker has a nice article called Geek to live: Essential tools for the placeless office:
Us Lifehacker editors have never been in the same room at once, yet we work together every weekday from 5 different cities across 2 time zones. If your team is distributed across vast distances like we are, you need to set […]

Over on the Office Evolution blog, Marc Orchant writes about a very interesting office package, ThinkFree Office. Orchant points out what makes ThinkFree different:
ThinkFree’s strategy differs from pure-play online offerings. They offer three different local versions of their software that work in concert with the online version of their suite which provides word processing, spreadsheet, […]

ajaxLaunch is a site notifying us all about the latest releases in the range of online office applications which are the brainchild of Michael Robertson, the chap who brought us all Linspire - a Windows-user friendly linux distro.
So far we have had ajaxWrite, a word-processor; ajaxSketch a drawing package aimed at diagramming and flow […]