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Corel Debuts Free WordPerfect Beta

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

February 27, 2007, 11:19 AM

Corel made a play for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie on Tuesday, releasing WordPerfect Lightning in beta, a free, compact version of its standard word processing suite that combines both online and offline functionality.

The company is referring to the product as a Google Writely, Adobe Reader, and Microsoft OneNote competitor rolled into one. At 16MB, the entire program can be placed on a USB stick or burned to CD to allow for maximum portability.

Online services would be provided by Joyent, which offers online services such as e-mail, calendars, address books, and file storage. In addition, users would be provided with 200MB of free storage.

"By blending desktop and Web applications in WordPerfect Lightning, Corel is taking a truly hybrid approach to computing, enabling users to maximize their productivity by making it simpler and faster to gather, organize and share critical information," office productivity manager Richard Carriere said.

Lightning is made up of four modules. Navigator, which helps users assemble and organize their content; Viewer, which can open documents in Word, PDF, and WordPerfect; and Lightning Notes, which is a small word processing and note-taking utility. Connector will contain the online services for the application, the company said.

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By pjjmartin

edited Mar 1, 2007 - 9:01 AM

Can't download the app through a firewall.

This is kind of a deal breaker. It's 2007 already, get some firewall support in there!

Score: 0

By sophist_dreams

edited Feb 28, 2007 - 4:24 PM

some one at Corel lied to you Marty

http://www.wordperfect.com/lightning

Score: 0

By marty

posted Feb 28, 2007 - 10:07 AM

Corel.com says no betas are being tested.
How did you guys get it - or perhaps you are talking about vaporware

Score: 0

By rimbaud

edited Feb 28, 2007 - 7:43 AM

No opendocument support? Come on guys, at least make an effort to look like you are still trying.

Score: 0

By mj132

edited Feb 28, 2007 - 6:52 AM

I like to think that this approach is well-thought out and represents a new way forward for the company. Time will tell. It certainly changes the revenue side of things, though, and as a platform, the horse might have already left the barn for good with Word dominance & established freebie programs like OpenOffice.

Score: 0

By mikefromuk

posted Feb 27, 2007 - 5:37 PM

Well done corel

Score: 0

By zridling

posted Feb 27, 2007 - 2:33 PM

And the world yawned. Corel is infamous for not making long-term commitments to their ventures, and this one is virtually useless without ODF support. Google and several other online suites are using the universal ODF format already. .DOC is dying as we speak; OXML was DOA.

Score: 0

By Skyfrog

edited Feb 27, 2007 - 5:24 PM

"Corel is infamous for not making long-term commitments to their ventures"

What are you talking about? Corel Linux was, uh...nevermind. You're right.

Score: 0

By zridling

posted Feb 27, 2007 - 7:06 PM

Not to mention how they ruined a perfectly good Paint Shop Pro.

Score: 0

By elftyrrell

posted Feb 27, 2007 - 7:50 PM

Yeah, what do you mean? They make Ventura... yeah, you're right again.

Score: 0

By Skyfrog

posted Feb 27, 2007 - 12:58 PM

It would be convenient, being able to just go to any computer and access all your documents and other files. I'm not completely comfortable with the idea myself but someday people will probably talk about how computers used to have loud spinning disks called "hard drives" where you stored all your files, and they'll laugh about it.

Score: 0

By enkoptokaf

posted Feb 27, 2007 - 3:12 PM

Hah hah. My first pc had a 13 MB hard drive. It wasn't that noisy, but we still laugh about it. Especially as I used to clean up all my c*** when I had used 8 MB. :-)

Score: 0

By kendallohio

posted Feb 27, 2007 - 11:42 AM

Sounds like a really interesting approach..have to wait and see how it plays out.

Score: 0

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