In the wake of the OpenOffice.org Conference in Lyon, France, Charles H. Schulz, the lead of OpenOffice.org's Native Language Confederation has revealed on his blog that OpenOffice will be bundled with Firefox extensions by the 2.0.4 version. "This release should be ready somewhere between the coming week and the end of the month. What this means is that besides the fact that OpenOffice.org could include extensions before, now the way to develop, include, select and manage them will be made easy. Aside the traditional .zip and unopkg extensions packages, a new and definitive extension format, .oxt, shall be used across the extensions that can be developed using a breadth of languages ranging from StarBasic to Java. New wizards and configuration tools shall be added for the benefit of our end users," announced Schulz.

Schulz also discussed the bundling of the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird email client and Sunbird calendar application into OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. In this context, Schulz stated that the inclusion of Mozilla products into the office suite will additionally determine the introduction of Sun Calendar Server and Microsoft Exchange connectors.

"A few months ago we change our release process as to accomodate more and more community's input and patches; and so we switched to a fully incremental, quarterly release schedule. Which in turns, makes the famous 3.0 rather unpredictable as to what its feature set and characteristics could be. This is why it is useless to look for a weird prototype of it quietly sitting in a virtual Area-51. The only objective of the 3.0 will be to make it much more modular and running on tops of frameworks such as Eclipse, Netbeans or Mozilla's XUL," concluded Schulz.