<p>German collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange is to launch a cloud-based office suite called OX Documents which will compete directly with Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. The first of the tools, the OX Text word processor, is due to launch at the beginning of April and has a neat design trick that gives it a major potential advantage over its competitors.</p><p>As well as being open source and running inside a browser, OX Text is non-destructive, retaining a document's original pre-upload file format, as GigaOM explains:</p><p>This is an extremely handy formatting and version control feature. Changes made to a document in OX Text get pushed through to Open-Xchange's backend, where a changelog is maintained. "Power" Word features such as Smart Art or Charts, which are not necessarily supported by other productivity suites, are replaced with placeholders during editing and are there, as before, when the edited document is eventually downloaded. As the OX Text blurb says, "OX Text never damages your valuable work even if it does not understand it".</p><p>"[This avoids] the big disadvantage of anything other than Microsoft Office," [Open-Xchange CEO Rafael] Laguna said. "If you use OpenOffice with a .docx file, the whole document is converted, creating artefacts, then you convert it back. That's one of the major reasons not everyone is using OpenOffice, and the same is true for Google Apps."</p><p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/03/21/startup-ox-documents-offers-alternative-to-google-docs-office-365/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=4750B8E9-EA61-5CA8-2209BEED5AD241B6">Open-Xchange to launch open-source, browser-based office suite</a> (IDG News Service)</p><p><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/open-xchange-launches-open-source-browser-based-office-productivity-suite-ox-documents-2013-03-20">Open-Xchange Launches Open Source Browser-Based Office Productivity Suite ...</a> (MarketWatch (press release))</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=d_C78C5g9EoOKGM_gLZFR7AJHYdIM&ned=us">15 additional articles.</a></p>