A new release of web-based office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation) ThinkFree Online adds the ability for users to mark their documents as CC licensed in ThinkFree’s DocExchange sharing portal. From ThinkFree’s announcement:

“We’re particularly excited to see Creative Commons features integrated throughout ThinkFree Online’s workflow. Creators using ThinkFree Office can offer certain rights to the public while retaining their copyright by choosing a Creative Commons license. Users can also reuse others’ licensed content through ThinkFree Online’s innovative advanced search and Flickr photo integration,” commented Mike Linksvayer, CTO of Creative Commons. “ThinkFree Online has opened up new possibilities, and we look forward to seeing how it develops in the future.”

The Flickr integration is particularly cool (see screenshot below), incorporating Flickr’s CC search into the ThinkFree UI and automatically adding attribution.

ThinkFree Office does not add a CC license notice to the document itself as does the Microsoft Office CC add-in — as noted above the chosen license is tracked in the DocExchange portal. We hope ThinkFree adds this capability, but the existing featureset is very exciting! Check it out.

Since the release of the Microsoft add-in we’ve gotten many requests for a similar OpenOffice extension and I expect to get more with this announcement. We don’t have the capacity to create such an extension ourselves (Microsoft created the MS Office add-in) but have gathered some information that should be useful for someone who wants to build an OpenOffice CC extension.

Watch this space for more “office” news!