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LibreOffice Conference 2013 Call for Papers Announced

Berlin, July 5, 2013 – LibreOffice Conference will be held in Milan, Italy, on September 25-27, 2013, at the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University. The Document Foundation invites members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers. Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice we want to hear from you.

The Call for Paper page is available at the following address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2013/en/call-for-papers.
Proposals should be filed by August 4, 2013, in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program. Detailed instructions on how to file proposals are available at the following address (and should be followed carefully): http://conference.libreoffice.org/2012/archive/support-information.

The conference program will be based on the following tracks:
a) Open Document Format (ODF) Track
b) Interoperability
c) LibreOffice – Development and the future: Technology, API, Extensions
d) Community-Track: Localization, Documentation, etc.
e) Best Practice and Migration: Certification and Support
f) Migrating to LibreOffice in governments and enterprises
g) Building a successful business around LibreOffice

Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last either 45 or 30 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 20 minutes (including Q&A). Workshops and panels will last longer (but they should not exceed 90 minutes), and will discuss a topic or an issue. Session will be streamed live and recorded for download.

The Document Foundation welcomes a new member of the Advisory Board: King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia

KACSTBerlin, June 25, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces that King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia is now an effective member of its Advisory Board. KACST sponsors the National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah: http://www.motah.org.sa/), which has been contributing to LibreOffice for almost one year, to enhance the Arabic language and the RTL (right-to-left) support, and to develop new features.

Motah LibreOffice Project (http://motah.org.sa/en/?q=node/94) is only one of the activities of Motah at KACST, where several software products are studied to explore the extent of Arabic support and their suitability for Arab users. LibreOffice was selected to be the first localization project because most Arab users need a full feature office suite.

liberoffice_image.png“Motah software engineers have been regularly contributing to LibreOffice since 2012, and are now one of the largest groups of full time developers hacking LibreOffice code, together with SUSE and Red Hat”, states Michael Meeks of SUSE, a Member of TDF Board of Directors. “Thanks to the injection of these new groups of hackers, during the last months we have been able to increase the number of contributors, which is now around 100 on a monthly basis and over 330 on a yearly basis”.

“It is fascinating to see The Document Foundation combining people from different cultures, languages and geographical locations around the development of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever”, says Dr.Turki Alsaud, KACST VP for research institutes. “Having KACST inside TDF Advisory Board reflects our support to the development of LibreOffice, extending our reach from the improvement of the Arabic language version to the development of new features and the improvement of the user interface”.

With the addition of KACST, the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation has now ten members: FSF, Google, Intel, KACST, MIMO, Red Hat, SPI, Lanedo, Freies Office Deutschland e.V. and SUSE (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Advisory_Board).

About KACST

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) is an independent scientific organization administratively reporting to the Prime Minister’s Office. KACST is both the Saudi Arabian national science agency and its national laboratories. The science agency function involves science and technology policy making, building national scientific database, funding of external research, and conducting applied scientific research in varius disciplines through its own research institutes and providing services such as the patent office, scientific information, and scientific consultations to public and private sector etc. KACST has currently over 2500 employees.

Media Contact KACST

Mohamed Alkanhal – Director of Computer Research Institute
Phone: + 966 11 4813765 – Email: cri@kacst.edu.sa (website: http://www.kacst.edu.sa)

The Document Foundation welcomes France’s MIMO in the Advisory Board

MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite) represents several bodies of the French government, and fosters the diversity of TDF Advisory Board by adding the voice of 500,000 professional users

MIMO

Berlin, June 17, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that MIMO – the working group of the French government including several ministries and administrations [1], for a total of 500,000 desktops – is now an official member of the foundation’s Advisory Board. MIMO primary goal is to give CIOs and their staff a way to share experience on office suites and operating systems, in order to speed up desktop modernisation.

MIMO is focused on the free desktop, and is one of a number of working groups focusing each one on a specific area of the information system under the guidance of the DISIC (French state CIO). Together, the working groups are creating an official set of free software for the ministries, with a specific application for each task.

MIMO has standardised on LibreOffice, developed by the Document Foundation, and is contributing to the development of the office suite through a commercial support agreement provided by certified developers. The role of MIMO is to validate successive versions of LibreOffice and make them compatible with the IT infrastructure and processes of member ministries. A single, standard LibreOffice version is validated and approved every year, according to the roadmap planned by MIMO members

To be approved, a version of LibreOffice is submitted to a qualification process: the software is tested to verify its compatibility with other business applications, and becomes a certified MIMO version only after all QA tests have been passed. The Ministry of Interior – for example – has a ten-step qualification process, with tests including compatibility with business applications, macros and deployment tools. The decision is taken by all the members representing the ministries.

MIMO is joining the current 8 members of TDF Advisory Board – Google, Intel, Lanedo, Red Hat, SUSE, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) – and will be represented by Laure Patas d’Illiers, of the Department of Treasury and Finance of the French government.

[1] Ministries: Agriculture, Culture, Defense, Economy, Education, Environment, Finance, Interior, Justice. Administrations: CAF (Family Allocation Funds), DILA (Direction of Legal / Administrative Information), ENA (National Administration School), National Assembly.

About MIMO

The MIMO working group was created by the Agency for Digital Development in Administration (ADAE) in 2005, under the governance of the Prime Minister. Since 2011, MIMO has been controlled by DISIC (Direction Interministérielle des Systèmes d’Information et de Communication), whose mission is to coordinate IT policy in French administrations. DISIC has launched working groups on cloud computing, the organisation and planning of IT systems, and Open Source. MIMO and the Open Source working group are managed by the CIO of the Ministry of Culture (Ministère de la Culture).

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.3

Berlin, May 9, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.3, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the third minor release of LibreOffice 4.0 family. OS X Intel packages are now signed by The Document Foundation, to pass OS X Gatekeeper security without user intervention.

In the meantime, another large migration to LibreOffice has been announced, as the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura has just begun the switch to free software of desktop PCs and expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated by the end of 2013. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source – including LibreOffice – will help save 30 million Euro per year.

Community is growing too. After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany, it is now the turn of the first LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup. It will take place on May 11, 2013 starting at 2pm in the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California. Bjoern Michaelsen will be there for some good Q&A, and most importantly for some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project, with Simon Phipps keynoting about “Foundations and Empires”.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice are still growing at a steady pace: +13% year over year according to data parsed by Ohloh, with an average of over 100 active developers per month since February 2013. These figures tops the cumulative number of over 650 new developers attracted by the project since the announcement on September 28, 2010.

Developers are contributing not only to the code but also to the quality of the software, as in the case of Markus Mohrhard’s python script for LibreOffice that automatically imports some 24,500 documents and tests if the program crashes in the process (http://mmohrhard.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/automated-import-crash-testing-in-libreoffice/), or Florian Reisinger’s LibreOffice Server Install GUI which performs a parallel installation of LibreOffice without using the command line, for QA purposes (http://flosmind.wordpress.com/libreoffice-server-install-gui/).

LibreOffice 4.0.3 is another important step in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of the suite, and facilitating migrations to free software by governments and enterprises.

The new release is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.3.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.3.2), and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC3 (fixed in 4.0.3.3).

TDF releases White Paper to help migrations to LibreOffice

Berlin, March 27, 2013 – The Document Foundation releases a white paper to help organizations migrate to LibreOffice. Published on Document Freedom Day, the text explains how governments and enterprises can leverage Free Software to lower their IT expenditures and get rid of proprietary software lock-in.

The white paper can be accessed from here: LibreOffice Migration White Paper (of course, it is a Hybrid PDF document, which can be edited with LibreOffice).

According to the white paper, migrations to Free Software – and especially to LibreOffice – should follow a carefully crafted change management process, which needs to handle not only the technical aspects, which are actually the easiest ones to cope with, but also the barriers met when breaking long-term working habits.

LibreOffice liberates the users from proprietary document formats by adopting natively ODF (Open Document Format), which is the standard document format recognized by the largest number of organizations and supported by the largest number of desktop software (including Microsoft Office).

In addition, LibreOffice offers the largest set of import filters for proprietary document formats (including Microsoft Office, Publisher, Visio and Works, plus Corel Draw, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPro, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect), and thus protects user investments in legacy applications, while providing a migration path to ODF.

Last but not least, LibreOffice templates are using only free fonts available on every OS which can be installed independently from any software package and thus foster interoperability between GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows users as documents maintain their original layout on every platform.

LibreOffice is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to maintain the infrastructure, and support events and marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at a global and local level.

Update: click here for the latest protocol documents

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.1

Impress Remote for Android now available on every platform

Berlin, March 6, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.1, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, the first release after the successful launch of LibreOffice 4.0 in early February, which has yielded rates of entirely new client IP addresses requesting updates each day over the 100,000 mark (they were just 25,000 one year ago).

LibreOffice Impress Remote is now available for all platforms – Linux, MacOS and Windows – from Google Play. How to instructions are available on the wiki.

The new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.0. For enterprise adoptions, though, The Document Foundation suggests the more solid and stable LibreOffice 3.6.5, backed by certified level 3 support engineers.

The Documentation team has also released the guide “Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0”, which is available in PDF and ODF formats from the website and as a printed book from Lulu.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation – infrastructure, marketing, community development – with a donation. There is a donation page with many options including PayPal and credit cards.

LibreOffice 4.0.1 is available for immediate download from the website. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the extension repository.

The change logs are available from the wiki: changes in RC1 (4.0.1.1) and changes in RC2 (4.0.1.2).

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