LibreOffice 7.1 "Community" Edition Released

LibreOffice 7.1 has just been released as the latest version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite that now carries "Community" branding and promoting of "Enterprise" variants as well.

Back during LibreOffice 7.0 development the de facto open-source version was and began talking up Enterprise versions. That LibreOffice Personal Edition concept was delayed from 7.0 while now with today's LibreOffice 7.1 release the main version is being marked as Community.

The Document Foundation outlines the emphasis of the new branding: "The Community label underlines the fact that the software is not targeted at enterprises, and not optimized for their support needs...For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements)...Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs. This has had a twofold negative consequence for the project: a poor use of volunteers’ time, as they have to spend their time to solve problems for business that provide nothing in return to the community, and a net loss for ecosystem companies."

For LibreOffice enterprise needs, The Document Foundation is promoting enterprise-level support from Adfinis SyGroup, Collabora Office / Collabora Online, and CIB's LibreOffice spins.

The LibreOffice 7.1 release announcement with talk of the new Community branding can be found at DocumentFoundation.org.

Besides the branding change, LibreOffice 7.1 brings a new Writer outline folding mode, multiple new table formulas being supported within the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets, faster find/replace performance, faster spell checking within Calc, Microsoft PowerPoint PPTX importing improvements, realistic soft-blurred shadows for objects can now be set within Impress, new physics-based animation capabilities for Impress presentations, various user-interface improvements, and never-ending work on Microsoft Word DOCX import/exporter enhancements.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community can be downloaded at LibreOffice.org.