The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. Major new features in this release are comments support in Author and Words, improved Pivot tables in Sheets, improved stability and the ability to open hyperlinks in Kexi.

Krita is now ready for professional artist use. A new slide sorter view and a new shape animations feature in KPresenter. Improvements of the core engine and plugins in the support of the OpenDocument Format. Especially text rendering has seen much work. A new report engine used in KPlato and Kexi.

The Danish Parliament has agreed to ditch some Microsoft-based software in favour of the ODF standard from April next year. The decision to axe Microsoft’s Office document formats won cross-party support.

KOfficeSource GmbH will offer professional services around the open source OpenDocument-based KOffice office suite. KOfficeSource GmbH will allow KOffice to be used in companies and organizations that demand high quality support and training for OpenDocument deployment. KOfficeSource GmbH will initially offer the following services to the market: migration and conversion to OpenDocument, consulting around the OpenDocument Format, training on OpenDocument and KOffice, customization of KOffice, custom programming.

the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.