Office on Linux?

Who woulda thunk it? The new Office 2007 Preview online demo is being served up from an Apache/Linux box!

When I first saw the story on CNET, I tried following the link in the story which took me to a Microsoft site. So far, so good.

The Microsoft site has a nice orange button called "Test Drive Office". Even better: orange is one of my favorite colors, as any Kerika user knows! Clicking on this button takes you to a site that's hosting the online Office preview. Which promptly died, presumably from the unexpectedly large traffic generated by the CNET story, although I can't help thinking that they ought to have expected a high volume of visitors given the publicity they were cranking up around Office Live.

But the way the site died was interesting: it threw a "JAR" error. Wait a minute... a JAR error did you say? That't what you get when a Java program dies! What does that have to do with Office 2007?

Intrigued, I decided to check out the site that's hosting the Office 2007 demo: I looked up "runaware.com" on WhoIs and found that it is operating from Sweden, and is not a Microsoft-owned site after all. Then I used NetCraft to see what the runaware.com site is running and guess what? It's a Linux+Apache environment!

Go figure.

---

Update June 2007: a number of people responded to this post by asking when Kerika was going to be available on Linux. Well, you can now use Kerika on Windows, Macs and Linux with the same great look-and-feel, and string together a distributed team that spans organizations, platforms and networks.

---

Advertisement:

Need a way to transport your Office documents online? Need a smarter way to view your Windows documents on Linux? Try converting your documents with a pdf converter. Also try an pdf to Excel converter for your spreadsheets.

The Partners Page

We just added a new page to our site that lists the growing number of third-party Web sites that are distributing the Kerika software. Many of these folks have taken the trouble to verify that the Kerika software is free of viruses, spyware, adware and other junkware. Some of these sites are Windows-only; others are serving up both the Mac and Windows versions.