“This is absolutely something we hope our partners can leverage,” he said. The idea is that users who enjoy using Lightning will want to eventually upgrade to WordPerfect Office X3, and polish their documents into something more professional that can be linked with advanced content management systems, he said. The bottom of the interface features a message center that will connect to help from Corel as well as other early adopters. Lightning is a less than 20MB download, which means users who are interested may not have to deal directly with their IT managers before experimenting with it, Larock said. You have to have a product with the right mix.”

“In the real world you’ll have some files on your desktop and some on the Web. It’s just another distribution model,” said Jay Larock, senior product manager for Corel’s WordPerfect Office division. “Taking an office suite and putting it online isn’t that innovative. It will allow users to view, edit, print and share documents, but high-quality formatting will require buying Corel’s WordPerfect Office X3, which was released about a year ago.Corel is launching Lightning at a time when traditional rivals such as Microsoft are offering online versions of its Office suite and startups such as Writely are being acquired by online-only companies like Google. The product is composed of a navigator, viewer and notes window that resembles an instant messaging interface. Although it will be available via the Web and will connect with other online tools, WordPerfect Lightning can also be loaded locally on a desktop and used without an Internet connection.

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