GNOME Office - Definition and Overview

The GNOME Office is an Office applications suite containing:

• Abiword word processor
• the Gnumeric spreadsheet
• Galeon, a web browser
• Gfax, sends and receives faxes
• Sodipodi and Sketch, vector drawing packages
• The GIMP, an image editing program
• Eye Of GNOME, an image viewer
• Balsa, an email client
• Novell Evolution, an email/groupware client
• Dia diagramming tool
• Guppi, a plotting and graphing program.
• Planner and Toutdoux, project management tools
• GnuCash, a personal finance manager
• Agnubis, a presentation program.
• GNOME-DB, software that provides database connectivity.

The integration between the various applications in the suite is rather loose, and therefore many consider GNOME Office to be merely the collection of desktop productivity applications written for the GNOME environment rather than an office suite in the usual sense. Integration is achieved chiefly through the Bonobo component technology.

GNOME Office is intended to be a competitor to the Microsoft Office suite. The KOffice suite was developed earlier, but was not at first free software according to the strict interpretation of the Free Software Foundation, so the GNOME desktop was created as a free alternative.

Neither suite is at this time competitive with the Microsoft products in user base, although the feature set of both projects is getting closer to that goal.

There also exists an office suite called OpenOffice.org which is the free software base used to create StarOffice. Sun Microsystems is integrating OpenOffice.org with GNOME with the intention that the applications of OpenOffice.org will become part of GNOME Office.

See also

• List of open-source software packages

External links

• GNOME Office home page (http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/)