Corel Releases WordPerfect Beta and Inches Closer to Dual Format Support

“As you may recall, Corel announced last November that the next
release of its flagship WordPerfect Office productivity suite would
support both the ODF as well as the OOXML document formats. That
announcement followed more than a year of (at best) ambivalent
statements by Corel regarding its format support intentions,
despite the fact that Corel was a founding member of the OASIS
Technical Committee that developed the ODF standard. In delaying so
long to embrace ODF it had seemed to me that Corel was missing the
chance of a lifetime, given that its core market was in government
users–the group most interested in long-term document
accessibility.

“Last year’s announcement told customers to anticipate the new
release in ‘mid 2007,’ and yesterday Corel finally announced that
the new release is now available–a bit late, and in beta, rather
than in final form…”

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