This morning, Corel released version X4 of the WordPerfect Office suite, which expands its set of PDF-friendly features.

The suite of apps, according to WordPerfect Office senior product manager Jason Larock, is the leader among non-Microsoft office suites. While other alternatives such as Google Apps and OpenOffice might be gaining some market share among individuals, enterprises leaders remain wary of open-source or non-traditional apps -- not because they're inherently bad, but because they require more care and feeding than many enterprises want to invest.

"We don't see them in the big accounts, we see them in European governments a little more," Larock says. "But not in the U.S., I think because of the questions of support...that, and weak marketing. When an IT department looks at OpenOffice, do they want to work on implementation and support of that, or do they want to get something with higher value?"

As for web-based productivity competitors such as Google Docs, Larock sees more interest -- but yet, pointing to recent market research he's seen, 94% of the general public isn't using online word processors, with a whopping 80% blissfully unaware of what Google Docs is.

So for now, Corel's beefing up the feature set for its office suite that includes WordPerfect; Quattro spreadsheet; Presentations, a PowerPoint equivalent; Lightning, a "digital notebook" to aggregate cut and paste content and images; an email client; and a group of web-based features that sync calendars, maintain a contacts database, and store documents online.

Office users making use of PDF documents in their workflows will find a surprisingly robust set of Acrobat-like features included in WordPerfect, considering it's not a direct Acrobat competitor like Jaws or NitroPDF or a high-end Acrobat plug-in. New to this edition:

• Scan-to-PDF optical character recognition (OCR)
• Password protection of PDF files
• A new PDF viewer that offers a fast preview of long documents
• Tagged PDF support for consumers of your content who employ screen readers
• Redaction tools
• PDF/A support to ISO specs
• PDF export from all the apps such as Quattro and Presentations
• Improved PDF import into WordPerfect for editing and exporting back to PDF
• File-size settings, which can save PDFs for Web viewing or higher-resolution printing
• Font embedding toggles

"It's a pretty robust set of options for cranking out a PDF, and I think that sets us apart from all the other office suites -- there's more capabilities here than most people need," says Greg Wood, Corel senior PR manager for office productivity.

The app suite also supports OpenXML and ODF, in addition to PDF. Both those open formats, Larock anticipates, will become more significant to the office user in the coming years. PDF being ratified as an ISO standard earlier this year, he adds, can only enhance PDF's adoption across large vertical markets such as legal.

"People are fighting about OpenXML and ODF right now, but you know what? No one really cares," says Larock, who adds that ISO's move validates Corel's heavy investment in PDF previous to its approval as an international standard. "PDF's all over the web, it's all over everything else."