Open Source You Can Use, April EditionOpen Source You Can Use, April Edition

This episode: OpenOffice gets another revision to the right of the decimal point, Remote Desktop becomes that much less crucial, and one of the original wikis.

The 3.1 release of OpenOffice has gone public, although it's more of an incremental fix than a revolutionary one. My biggest complaint: the lack of a really robust, professional grammar-checking module, which a third party will need to provide since OO.o doesn't actually have one. The most common candidate is LanguageTool, but I was unimpressed with it, and would gladly pay $15-20 for a professionally-created grammar-checking module for OO. You listening, Sun?

Remote-control software TightVNC is now in revision 1.3.10, with improved performance and a bundle of useful little new features. I've used it many times now to help perform repairs on friends' computers on the other side of the country, or just to connect to my desktop machine from my notebook down the hall. If you can't afford a version of Windows with Remote Desktop, this is the next best thing. Version 1.43, out later this year, promises a major rewrite of the way the program works on Windows -- something it's needed badly for some time now.

Want a wiki? So did I, but the full-blown-ness of MediaWiki was a bit much for me. To that end, I dropped back and discovered one of the original Wiki applications, PhpWiki. Dead simple, GLP2 licensed, and doesn't even need a database -- it'll work on a web server that support PHP and nothing else.

Attend a Webcast on making the switch to software as a service. It happens April 23. Find out more and register.

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