Writely Embraces the OpenDocument Movement

PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif. - November 21, 2005 -  Writely (www.writely.com), The Web Word Processor, today released support for OpenDocument Format (ODF), the open standard document format backed by Sun Microsystems, IBM and Adobe.  Starting today, Writely users can upload documents into Writely from Microsoft Word and Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org, as well as save the documents back into either of those formats.  Sun and Google announced last month their intention to explore jointly enhancing and promoting OpenOffice.org.

Writely is a leading web-based productivity application, using Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX to provide a rich user experience in the browser.  Users can be up and running in seconds -- no software installation required.  At the same time, Writely has the familiar look and feel of a desktop application, making it easy to use and accessible to the mass market of computer users.

Since its beta launch in August 2005, Writely has enjoyed enthusiastic adoption from users all over the world including businesses, bloggers, editors, students, teachers, poets and playwrights.  Just as Web-based email services solve the fundamental problem of only having access to your email from one computer, Writely enables users to access and edit their documents from any computer on the Internet. Writely then goes several steps further by enabling easy blog posting, Internet publishing and editing by multiple authors. 

While Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff and others have hailed Writely as a serious challenge to Microsoft and its dominance of the office productivity market, Writely is not a carbon-copy of existing desktop solutions. Rather, Writely is an innovative, Web-centric word processor that leverages the connected nature of the Internet to provide online storage, editing, sharing and communication of documents - documents that users can now upload and save in multiple formats.

Case#1: Kung Fu Film International Thinktank

Connected Films in Brighton, England is using Writely to create business plans for a feature film (Brighton Wok) that incorporate input from advisers across the United States, England, Mexico, Thailand, Austria and Australia: "We have a continuous list of the group's ideas on Writely, and we can refer to all the latest ideas from our friends across the world whenever we need to - brilliant."

Case#2: New Orleans Recovery Coordination
The IT department staff of a New Orleans company has been scattered across the region - Baton Rouge, Madisonville, New Orleans and Houston - due to Hurricane Katrina.  They are using Writely to coordinate their plans for getting back to New Orleans in December: "This service is amazing. We tried a couple of the other web-based tools, but this has the coolest interface and functionality."

Case#3: NaNoWriMo Collective Novel Creation

By midnight on November 30th, a group of seven writers are due to finish a 50,000 word novel as part of National Novel Writing Month: "We are using the Web Word Processor Writely which is ideal for a collaborative project like this, where people from both the U.K. and the U.S. are working on the same document."  (You can view the novel in progress at http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docid=acjp62pqm98b)

"Many of our beta service users have been asking us for OpenDocument Format support, and we are thrilled that Writely now allows users of this open file format to store, edit and share their documents on the Web," says Sam Schillace, Upstartle co-founder. "We love our users - they give us great ideas all the time about how to improve Writely. This is just the beginning."

For additional information, Contact: Jennifer Mazzon - Upstartle, LLC - 650-796-6845 - press@writely.com

About Writely

Writely (www.writely.com) allows you to store, edit and publish documents online - privately, in collaboration with specific people, or publicly on the Internet.

About Upstartle, LLC.

Upstartle is a Silicon Valley-based software development company founded in 2004 by a team of 3 senior engineers, all with long track records in mass-market consumer software.