This yet-to-be patched vulnerability puts at risk all voluntary groups running the versions of the proprietary software highlighted in the article, and users are recommended to keep their security software up-to-date, however M6-IT have a more elegant solution - that is much simpler in the long run.

Switch to a system that uses Open Document Format (ODF), the recommended ISO-standard files for document interchange, used in office suites such as OpenOffice.org - instead of a word processor and operating system that allows arbitary execution of code inserted into innocent -looking documents and pictures.

This also frees organisations from the upgrade treadmill - having to buy a new version of MS Office each time they change the format, just to open a document that someone has sent you. Conversely, many community groups are producing documents on ten year-old versions of MS Word that recent versions used in other offices can no longer recognise. With open formats, your data is available to you forever,

OpenOffice.org can open most documents sent to you in Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint format, but for the long-term availability of your data we recommend moving to the only internationally ratified standard for the interchange of office files.

There are other applications that will work with ODF, and work on older hardware as they use less memory, but we recommend OpenOffice.org as it's a modern office suite with all the functionality that you would expect, and it runs across all major desktop platforms: Apple MacOS-X; GNU/Linux; Sun Solaris; and MS Windows. Additionally support, training, and the availability of books is very good.

Oh, and OpenOffice.org exports to PDF, too :-)