The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office is now offered for the premium price of $99 per application user plus an annual support fee of $19.80 with a minimum order quantity of 100 licenses. No information are currently offered if the product will be made available to Office end users as well.

The main Sun ODF Plugin page is still displaying a Get it now. Free button which when clicked links to the new pricing information that are then redirecting the user to the Oracle shop.

Microsoft Office 2007 has integrated ODF 1.0 support with the release of the service pack 2. The ODF plugin on the other hand adds support for ODF 1.2 document formats introduced in Open Office 3.2.

The PDF document will be imported into Draw and Impress to preserve the layout of the documents. This naturally means that Draw and Impress have to be installed to work with the PDF Import Extension. Plans are to concentrate on editing capabilities in the next development step concentrating on Writer. Just keep in mind that the current version of the PDF Import Extension supports layout and not editing.

PDF documents can be imported using the Open file dialog. Import takes relatively long but the results are surprisingly good for a beta. One interesting feature of the extension is the option to create hybrid documents that consists of a pdf and odf part. Users with Open Office installed will open the ODF version of the document while users without will load the pdf part.

Open Office users that work with PDF documents from time to timeshould pay close attention to the development of the PDF Import Extension.

The current release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is scheduled for the first half of 2009 which means that it will take about a year before Microsoft is adding the support officially. Common Open Document File extensions are .oft for word processing, .ods for spreadhsheets, .odp for presentations and .odg for graphics.

The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Office 2007 the ability to load, save and edit odf files. The plugin is also compatible to previous editions of Microsoft Office including Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2000. The plugin integrates itself seamlessly into the Save and Load file dialogs and is translated into several languages including English, German, French, Spanish and a dozen more.

Update: The ODF Plugin is no longer available on the Sun or Oracle website.

Four different versions of the Java Runtime Environment were installed on my system and JavaRa removed the three versions of JRE that were the oldest from the system. I started by scanning my system for old versions of Java which were removed, then checked if there was a Java update available. I should have done it the other way round because an update was found and a new version of Java was installed on my system.

Which led to the fact that the previously newest version was not the newest anymore so I had to run the cleanup process again to remove that version. The best way to use the application is therefor to run the Update first and check for old versions once the software has checked for and installed possible updates.

The Open Office Extension Repository lists the currently available extensions for Open Office. Visitors can use the search function, the tag cloud or one of the six available entries like viewing the most popular or recently updated extensions for Open Office. Some extensions are, contrary to the Firefox add-ons website, not free but the majority of available ones are.

A quick glance at the available extensions brought up already several that I will definitely look closer at. You can grab some free content extensions like professional template packs (free) or graphics from the website and add (advanced) support for online services like Google Docs.

Sun did develop some useful add-ons as well. The two that caught my attention are the Sun Presentation Minimizer which reduces the size of presentations and the Sun Report Builder which can be used to create professional looking database reports.

The Open Office Extensions website is definitely worth taking a look at if you are an Open Office user.