New Open Office 3.0 Crashes Servers

Demand for the latest, improved version of Open Office was so great that it crashed the servers on its release yesterday.

You could say that the new version of the open-source productivity suite, Open Office 3.0, is a hit. Released at 10 am British time yesterday, the demand was so great that it very quickly crashed the servers, according to ZDNet.

OpenOffice.org’s marketing lead, John McCreesh, noted that while most downloads are from mirror sites, "the fact that our central site can’t even run the bouncer [to divert requests to those local mirrors] must mean it’s… our biggest-ever download."

The new version brings in several new features, including support for Mac OS X, and it can read .docx Office Open XML (OOXML) documents created in Office 2007, as well as offering greater integration of extensions. But you can’t export OOXML documents to Open Office, nor can Open Office users send a document to Office 2007 users – it needs to be sent in an older Office format.