div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"The release of a new version of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite hit a snag Monday when the community experienced Web site problems that made downloading the suite extremely slow and at times impossible for users./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The OpenOffice.org Community released OpenOffice.org 3.0, a new version of the open source productivity suite that competes with Microsoft Office. However, a note on the community#39;s Web site Monday apologized for problems with the site, attributing them to demand for the new suite that was higher than expected./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ For more on potential challengers to Microsoft Office, see InfoWorld Test Center#39;s#160;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/15/29TC-office-alternatives_1.html?source=fssr"review of Google Docs, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony, and OpenOffice.org/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;Apologies -- our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org,quot; according to a a href="http://www.openoffice.org/"note/a. quot;The technical teams are trying to come up with a solution.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"A spokeswoman for OpenOffice.org#39;s public relations firm confirmed the problems Monday, saying that while people have been quot;successfully downloadingquot; the suite all day, quot;there are times when the servers get overrun due to volume.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"OpenOffice.org set up a a href="http://download.openoffice.org/"temporary landing page/a for users until site issues have been fully resolved, she added. Though the URL is different, it looks the same as the regular OpenOffice.org page./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"As of about 2 p.m. ET, the OpenOffice.org site was working very slowly, although several different language versions of OpenOffice.org 3.0 -- including English, French, German, and Italian -- were available for downloading from the site. Older versions of the suite also were available for download./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"OpenOffice.org is a freely available and open source competitor to Microsoft Office. The 3.0 version of the suite makes it more extensible for users, allowing them to add third-party features from an OpenOffice.org repository to the suite, which offers basic productivity, spreadsheet, and presentation software, according to the OpenOffice.org community./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"New add-on features available for OpenOffice.org 3.0 are support for business analytics and the ability to import PDF documents. There is also a feature for creating hybrid PDF documents, which have the ODF (Open Document Format) attached to the PDF document. ODF is the file format for documents that OpenOffice.org uses; it is recognized as an international standard by the ISO./p/div View the full article