synopsis

With the release of two new office productivity tools under the banner of Oracle Office, Oracle has clearly indicated its strategy to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Office in the market. However, Oracle's market entry through its acquisition of Sun has also sparked a shake-up of the open source community, introducing confusion and uncertainty for organisations using OpenOffice.org-based products. This report analyses Oracle’s strategy both in terms of its commercial proposition in this market as well as its position regarding the open source community in this area, and provides advice to organisations considering their office productivity suite strategy.