The KOffice team is happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming 2.2 release of KOffice. This release brings back Kexi, the data management application similar to MS Access. The new beta also offers many new features and improvements, bug fixes, and improved support for Microsoft file formats.

Kexi 2.2 - Form Designer
The 2.2beta1 release of KOffice gives you a preview of what will be new and improved when the final 2.2 version is released in May. As you can see in the list of changes, there are many new features and an old application from KOffice 1 has made a reappearance: Kexi, the data manager in the style of MS Access. Another completely new feature is import filters for the MS OOXML formats, introduced in MS Office 2007.
Readiness for End Users and External Developers
The KOffice team had hoped to have time to make the user interface and available feature set ready for end users as well as make the underlying engine ready for external extension developers in time for 2.2. Unfortunately time and limited developer resources didn’t permit to reach both of these goals. The libraries have been reorganized and improved, but the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve.
Notable exceptions to this are Krita, that has seen much work on the user interface and Karbon that was already usable before.
Sponsored Development and OpenDocument Community Work
Release 2.2 will be the first release where external companies and organizations made significant contributions in development. Nokia has sponsored much work on the general improvements and the converters for importing MS file formats for their Maemo office viewers. NLnet has sponsored the work on RDF metadata and change tracking. KO GmbH as well as NLnet have sent participants to the ODF plugfest and OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto, Italy.
Sources and Binary Packages
The source code to KOffice 2.2 beta 1 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.2beta1 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.