With OpenOffice.org receiving a lion's share of commercial support and market awareness for a free office suite, KOffice 2.0 has the potential to challenge its dominance with innovative features and a leaner code base.

"KOffice is much more lightweight," Kugler said. "One often hears that OpenOffice's codebase is quite complex and rather large. While KOffice is lacking some functionality compared to OpenOffice, it's certainly catching up - and eating less valuable developer time in the process."

"Mid- to long-term I think this will make a huge difference. Having a clean code base makes bridging those gaps and implementing new and innovative ways of working in the office space much easier. KOffice is also much easier on your system resources."

The KDE project pitches KOffice as "the most comprehensive office suite", as it consists of 11 applications - from the standard word processor and spreadsheet to the Krita image manipulation tool and Kivio flowcharting application. KOffice even has its own database creator and alternative to Microsoft Access, dubbed Kexi.

With all the recent industry talk about document formats, KOffice has already transitioned to OpenDocument Format (ODF) by default and while it is not yet fully compatible with the standard, it is being worked on.

Kugler said there are no plans for KOffice to support Microsoft's OOXML format, an incompatibility which may hinder document sharing on Windows.

KOffice may be not as widely used as OpenOffice.org or the venerable Microsoft Office, but that hasn't stopped its developers from working on innovative features, which will be available in version 2.0.

"There's some very cool new technology in it, like the shape technology that makes it possible to embed any type of KOffice document in another without constant export/import cycles, it's just seamless," Kugler said, adding that other things that have really been improved are text rendering and printing support.

The new Flake library will allow KOffice to use any shape - from a circle to a spreadsheet - in any application. For example, one Google Summer of Code project was to create a music notation flake.

Other improvements include a new colour management library, support for the Kross scripting framework, and a new collaboration engine.

"Integration with the rest of the [KDE] desktop is certainly a big plus," Kugler said. "I also find KOffice a pleasure to work with. Its menu structures are clear, I don't need hours to find out how to change small aspects of the document, and indeed, it's lightning fast."

Consumers can expect KOffice 2.0 for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X sometime next year, but the exact release date is not yet planned.