The recently released Open Office Version 3 has caused such a stir by such vendors like Sun and the Mozilla foundation, OOO’s servers were briefly taken offline due to enormous amounts of requests (something thecoffeedesk has suffered from in the past as well). The site has been briefly brought back up now, however, for the sole purpose of providing links to mirror sites for the version 3 download.

Ah yes, we’ve been anticipating the release of version 3, and the Open Office folks even threw a lavish party to celebrate its approach a few days ago. However, almost as soon as it hit the site for downloading, the hungover developers had their servers taken offline due to demand.

The site is finally back up again, after cycling through a regular timeout error common with slashdottings, then HTTP 403 Forbidden messages, then finally a special placeholder for the site was brought online, merely linking to high-bandwidth download mirrors for the version 3 software. The new site, as of the time of this writing, says:

Apologies – our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented
demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are
trying to come up with a solution.

The response to the new release has been largely positive, many praising its OpenDocument 1.2 standard support, Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008 compatibility, and its enhanced start center and zoom features. The new release is crucial to businesses looking to invest (mere time) into the new release while retaining the ability to network with businesses using Microsoft’s Office suite, something you may see less of in the trying economic times ahead.

Backers such as Sun, Google and the Mozilla foundation are sure to make this the best Open Office release to date, with few expecting any less from such a revered open source project that helps etch Linux into the business area as well as the desktop area for those willing to try it. The Microsoft Windows build as well brings Microsoft a new challenge for its Microsoft Office suite, which also faces friendly competition from Google Docs as well, yet will always have a place in the business and desktop office software market.

The Coffee Desk is going to make an attempt to mirror compressed executables of the English version 3 releases for Windows, RPM and Debian formats, distributed along with 7-Zip for compression . We will provide a link as it comes available.

UPDATE: here is a link to a mirror for the Windows (English). The Debian binary can also be found under that directory as well. Enjoy!