In the latest challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop software market, OpenOffice.Org this week released the newest version of its free office productivity suite for download. The updated version of the software, which recently gained formal support from IBM, includes a number of new user-friendly tools and security features.

"It is a major release and all users should download it," said OpenOffice.org officials, in a statement posted on the group's Web site. Among other things, OpenOffice 2.3 includes improved support for extensions that add capabilities to the suite's core word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications.

Other enhancements include new keyboard shortcuts for more efficient database navigation, support for use of Jewish calendar dates in documents, a new chart wizard for chart creation and an improved password system for data protection.

Despite the fact that it's free, OpenOffice has to date failed to make much of a kink in Microsoft's multibillion dollar desktop software business. But that could change as the suite gains additional, enterprise-class usability and security features. Many of those new features will come courtesy of IBM. Big Blue has said it will task 35 programmers with building enhancements for OpenOffice.

IBM also said it will release a private label version of OpenOffice called Lotus Symphony.

IBM officials said the company hopes to build an ecosystem around OpenOffice and the format on which it's based -- the Open Document Format.

"There hasn't been much innovation in the desktop software space in years, talking paperclips notwithstanding," Doug Heintzman, strategy director for IBM collaborative technologies, said in an obvious dig at Clippy, the on-screen guide that Microsoft introduced with Office 97.

Heintzman and other ODF backers say the OpenOffice format is more flexible than Microsoft's new Office Open XML (OOXML) specification, which recently failed to gain fast-track approval from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ODF allows for the relatively easy creation of an abstraction layer between the data that's in a document and the application used to view or manipulate the document. That makes for improved data portability, Heintzman said. ODF is "modern and technically elegant," he said.

For its part, Microsoft contends that OOXML-based documents, such as those created in Office 2007, allow users to easily import data from numerous sources and that the format has been ratified by the standards body ECMA International. They also note that OpenOffice has been around in one form or another for years without significantly affecting the company's desktop revenues.