AbiWord Revamps Word Processor, Launches Collaboration Tool

Microsoft, Google, Zoho, IBM and others have a new productivity tool to contend with. Abiword isn’t ready to take the enterprise world by storm just yet, but with an attractive user interface and integrated collaboration tool, it’s an excellent free alternative to those other tools. It’s certainly come a long way since The Faster Times technology editor Gary Krakow reviewed it in 2002.

The company introduced version 2.8 of AbiWord together with the AbiCollab Web-based collaboration platform, enabling real-time document editing, online document storage and document sharing. It also converts documents from major document formats like Word.

The organization notes on its Web site:

Our source code is carefully written so that AbiWord will run on virtually any operating system with a minimum of time spent on porting. This combined with our support for internationalization (the ability to run AbiWord in many languages) gives AbiWord a massive potential user-base… Currently we run on most UNIX systems, Windows 95 and later, QNX Neutrino 6.2. We also have a MacOS X native port available.

The application and collaboration suite will be increasingly attractive to large organizations (like the city of Los Angeles) looking to get away from the aggressively-priced Microsoft Office suite but uninspired by existing alternatives like Google Apps (which Los Angeles did pick). That said, the lack of spreadsheet and presentation software is a serious drawback.

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