KDE is an open platform based on the work of thousands of volunteers over the last 10+ years. Because we are an open platform, 3rd parties can develop and extend the platform and its applications to suit their needs. This also allows vendors to have more control over the end product they ship to their customers.
The KDE Education platform is a collection of open applications that can be extended by third parties. This allows non-English speaking countries to extend the applications to their needs. This platform also contains a range of applications that can work with with young children as well as university students.
Kontact provides easy access to remote hosted email using all major email protocols, as well as local and remote shared calenders and address books. These features provide a powerful experience to small business users who wish to manage their email communications work flow.
Kontact supports major open data formats, such as ical, and vcard files. This allows easy collaboration with other personal information management services.
KDE's brand new multimedia architecture provides the ability to have audio and video integrated and embedded into all KDE applications.
KDE's state of the art phonon multimedia system enables developers to do more without having to learn or understand details about the underlying concepts.
Plasma is KDE's new desktop environment that enhances the users desktop experience. Due to the extensible nature of plasma users can extend and customize their desktops to suit their personalities and needs.
Plasma provides an integrated experience that ties together multimedia and semantic network information as well as local system data. This provides desktop and panel access to any resources the user desires.
Konqueror is an enterprise class web browser that supports the latest web standards. This make KDE an ideal platform for knowledge workers who need thin client access to remote web services.
KDE's default application stack provides clients to access remote services such as Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol, IMAP and POP email, secure HTTP, and Microsoft file sharing services.
KDE is an open platform involving many volunteers from all over the world. This allows any user to join the project and participate at any level. KDE has volunteers that do everything from application development, to usability studies, to documentation, to artwork, to translation and internationalization, and more.