The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers

Berlin & Barcelona, November 7, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, who are recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users. They are: Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical), Caolan McNamara (RedHat), Cedric Bosdonnat (SUSE), Christian Lohmaier (Volunteer), David Tardon (RedHat), Eike Rathke (RedHat), Eilidh McAdam (Lanedo), Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Jan Holesovsky (SUSE), Kohei Yoshida (SUSE), Lionel Elie Mamane (Volunteer), Lubos Lunak (SUSE), Markus Mohrhard (Volunteer), Michael Meeks (SUSE), Michael Stahl (RedHat), Petr Mladek (SUSE), Rene Engelhard (Volunteer), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Thorsten Behrens (SUSE), Timár András (SUSE) and Tor Lillqvist (SUSE).

Certification is a key milestone for building LibreOffice ecosystem, and increase the number of organizations capable of adding value around the best free office suite ever (and, hopefully, help to spread the adoption over proprietary and open source office suites). LibreOffice Certified Developers have been peer reviewed by the Engineering Steering Committee, which has appointed Bjoern Michaelsen, Jan Holesovsky and Stephan Bergmann to manage the certification process for developers.

Certified developers extend the reach of the community to the corporate world, and offer CIOs and IT managers a professional recognition in line with corporate requests for added value development and support services. TDF will soon extend certification to Migration Professionals and Training Professionals, starting from early 2013.

The LibreOffice Certification Program is outlined on the project website at the following address: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/. There is also a specific mailing list – certification@global.libreoffice.org – dedicated to the certification project, which is reaching all the members of the Certification Committee. Requests for information and applications should be addressed to this mailing list.