Friday, 4 August 2006

A Price Tag on Alternative Office Productivity Suite NeoOffice 2.0 Beta

NeoOffice has rolled out its alternative office productivity suite, NeoOffice 2.0 Beta. For the uninitiated NeoOffice is a free software port of OpenOffice.org to the MacOS X platform.

In a move similar to that of Microsoft’s strategy earlier this week in charging for its Office 2007 beta, the newly released software will cost you pocket as well. The software is available only through the NeoOffice Early Access Program for which you must pay a membership fee to join. It is currently priced at USD 25, but after August 15, the price will drop to a more reasonable USD10.



NeoOffice is a fully-featured set of office applications including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs for Mac OS X. NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office as well. The current full release of NeoOffice is available free of charge, and version 2.0 Alpha 4 is also available free of charge.