I’ll try the free version that Lucidchart offers and see how it goes.

LucidChart (http://www.lucidchart.com) is web-based which makes it particularly appealing for teams as it supports real-time collaboration.

Besides Dia, don’t forget that OOo (and derivatives, see below) includes a Draw program. Don’t forget Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) and GIMP (www.gimp.org GIMP is more a Photoshop replacement than a Viseo replacement). For those in more technical fields, look at the Eclipse based UML and associated tools (http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/?project=uml2)

PortableApps carries Dia, GIMP, OOo, and Inkscape (Windows only, but still handy to always have on a USB flash drive or SD card).

Because of the rather poor track record of Oracle, who took over Sun, there is a good deal of concern about the future of OpenOffice. Many of the principle developers are continuing to work on it, but as part of the LibreOffice suite, which is now under the Document Foundation (documentfoundation.org). The three main supporters of OpenOffice all have used different derivatives (Sun (now Oracle) had StarOffice (now Oracle Office), IBM used the components in an Eclipse wrapper for Lotus Symphony, Novel has supported and distributes go-oo. All of these are based on the core OpenOffice code, which are customized to support proprietary (which the various vendors have license to use) features, provide a different user experience, etc. See http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Solutions for a list of various other customizations and options for use of OpenOffice. Go-oo is now collaborating with Libre Office. We will have to see what IBM and Novel do as time goes on. The good news is that these are all compatible with each other, and even plug-ins designed for one typically work with others.

This can be a bit confusing! If all you want is an office suite, just download LibreOffice. You can choose plug-ins/add-ons from OpenOffice site or the Document Foundation.

There is also some other helpful free open source software of high quality that works well with OpenOffice/etc. TreeLine (http://treeline.bellz.org/) is a very robust but easy to use application to create outlines and hierarchical/XML databases. FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) and VYM (View Your Mind http://www.InSilmaril.de/vym) are nice mind-mapping tools. Finally, if you need a fully functional embedded database with full transactional support (ACID), it is simple to add the H2 database (http://www.h2database.com/) as a replacement for the lighter weight database engine distributed with OOo/LibreOffice. There are also several extensions for use with MySQL on the OOo page, if you need to step up to an enterprise class RDBMS.

Keep your eyes open for increasing integration with XML databases (such as eXist http://exist.sourceforge.net) and/or the Drools (aka JBoss rules) platform. Combined with semantic web approaches (http://www.semanticdesktop.org/) very elegant and powerful enterprise (and personal) document management, data extraction and data mining (perhaps using tools like Mondrian, RapidMiner, JasperReports, R, and/or Weka–all FOSS) and rule-based workflow. This will be a huge change for many, as the power of systems currently costing 5-6 figures becomes available for ‘free’ (you still need to invest in time, energy, people, training, just like you would with anything else). Much of this will happen first with OpenOffice/LibreOffice/etc. because #1 they are open source and easier to enhance, and #2 they use international standards internally (rather than Microsoft’s long-standing FUD technique of creating its own one-off but still mostly XML Windows-only pseudo-standards).

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Thanks and keep the great job !