After more than three years of hard work, the team behind the popular KOffice suite announced today the release of KOffice 2.0.0. The cross-platform office productivity suite has been almost completely rewritten and consists of six applications, each suited to cover various tasks either at home or in an enterprise environment.

"Over the last few years, the KOffice team has reworked the framework into an agile and flexible codebase.  Our intention was to increase integration between the components of KOffice, decrease duplication of functionality and ease maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new approaches to UI design and interacting with the user have been implemented to support the new capabilities." said the KOffice Team in the official release announcement.

But, as this version is the first using the new engine, the team only recommends it to early adopters, developers and testers, urging regular users to wait for upcoming maintenance releases. "KOffice 2.0 will be useful for some users, but since it is the first release in a long series, it is likely to contain bugs and incompatibilities." Moreover, certain components that existed in KOffice 1.6 aren't available in 2.0.0, but are expected to be re-introduced in KOffice 2.1 and 2.2. The wait will be worth it, as the team promises to make them more efficient and better integrated in the suite.

Applications included in KOffice 2.0.0:

· KWord Word processor
· KSpread Spreadsheet manager
· KPresenter Presentations creator
· KPlato Project management tool
· Karbon Vector graphics editor
· Krita  Raster graphics editor

The KChart software that existed in previous releases is now available throughout the whole KOffice Suite in the form of a shape plug-in. What's missing from this release? The Kexi database creator, the formula shape, and Kivio Flowchart editor; if the first two are almost certain to be available in KOffice 2.1, Kivio is not maintained anymore and its future is uncertain.

One of the major new features in KOffice 2 is "Flake," a shape that can either be a simple geometric figure or a very complex chart. But the best part is that Flake Shape is available in all of KOffice 2.0.0 components, providing very solid integration and interoperability.

KOffice 2.0.0 also boasts a redesigned, customizable GUI (Graphical User Interface) made to work best with wider screen formats. Each individual toolbox can be undocked or docked to better suit your workflow. KOffice also remembers the layout and settings so users won't need to reconfigure them with every launch of the program.

Another anticipated change is native support for the ODF, Open Document Format, ensuring compatibility with other Office suites, including OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office. 

Download KOffice 2.0.0 right now from Softpedia.