The Document Foundation welcomes Adfinis SyGroup to the project’s Advisory Board

Berlin, May 23, 2019 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announced today that Adfinis SyGroup – a Swiss FOSS company headquarted in Bern, with offices in Basel, Zurich and Crissier (Vaud) – has joined the project’s Advisory Board.

Adfinis SyGroup is using LibreOffice for office productivity, in addition to providing professional consultancy to customers with SLA contracts to support migrations from proprietary software to LibreOffice. The company has helped to organize the LibreOffice Conference in 2014, when the event was hosted by the Bern University, is contributing patches to the source code, and is also hosting various TDF servers and buildbots on their infrastructure.

More recently, Adfinis SyGroup has helped Collabora to start porting LibreOffice to Apple iOS to allow drafting and editing ODF standard documents on Apple iPads. The underlying base of the software is LibreOfficeKit, which uses the LibreOffice code base to do tiled rendering. On top of that, a HTML/JS solution builds the UI for platforms using VCL under the hood.

“Adfinis SyGroup has been a friend of The Document Foundation since forever, and has recently increased its involvement in the LibreOffice project with the port to Apple iOS. We share the same vision about FOSS as a key element for the future of technology and innovation, and open standards as the only available road to true interoperability”, says Marina Latini, TDF Chairwoman.

“Our support for LibreOffice is part of our strategy to not only use FOSS software, but actively enable its improvement, strengthening the ecosystem and through that making the solution usable for more people. We are working closely with our partner Collabora as they invest in the iOS port, as well as helping branded LibreOffice products to gain more market share in the enterprise environment. By convincing more corporate and government organizations to choose an enterprise subscription for a branded LibreOffice we help to fund resources to further improve the product and project. We’re looking forward to contribute our many years of experience as part of the FOSS community, as well as our strong network to enterprise customers, to the TDF Advisory Board in order to contribute to one of the most important FOSS projects”, says Nicolas Christener, Adfinis SyGroup CEO and CTO.
TDF Advisory Board’s (AB) primary function is to represent supporters of the project, and to provide the Board of Directors (BoD) with advice, guidance and proposals. In addition, the AB is at the kernel of the LibreOffice ecosystem, and as such is key to the further development of the project.

Annual Report 2018: New releases of LibreOffice

Thanks to your generous donations, and contributions from our ecosystem of certified developers, we released two major releases of LibreOffice in 2018: 6.0 on January 31, and version 6.1 on August 8.

In addition, 14 minor releases were also made available throughout the year, for the 5.4, 6.0 and 6.1 branches. Meanwhile, several Bug Hunting Sessions were held in preparation for the new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 5.4 were held on April 27, May 28 and July 3 – while those for LibreOffice 6.2 took place on October 22, November 19 and December 21.

LibreOffice 6.0

On January 31, LibreOffice 6.0 was officially released after six months of development. This included a new ePUB filter, for saving documents as eBooks, while support for opening QuarkXPress documents was added as well. Other new features included: a revamped special characters dialog; OpenPGP support for signing and encryption on all desktop platforms; a brand new web browser-based help system; and better flexibility when using custom dictionaries.

In addition, LibreOffice 6.0 lets users perform mail merge operations using data from tables inside Writer itself, while in Calc, new commands were added to select unprotected cells on protected or unprotected sheets. Impress was also improved thanks to 10 new templates, designed for home and business use. This video summarises the improvements:

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LibreOffice 6.1

Later in the year, on August 8, LibreOffice 6.1 was made available. This release included many new features such as Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft’s icon design guidelines, which makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment.

The image handling engine was reworked to be significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft’s proprietary formats.

Then there was the reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules, along with a major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server).

Finally, Online Help pages were enriched with text and example files to guide the users through various features, and are now easier to localize. Check out the other short video:

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This was all possible thanks to your donations! Support our community today, so we can keep improving LibreOffice, organising events and sharing knowledge. Thank you!

The Document Foundation releases LibreOffice 6.2.4

Berlin, May 22, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2.4, the fourth bug and regression fixing release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family, targeted at tech-savvy individuals: early adopters, technology enthusiasts and power users.

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/, to improve LibreOffice by contributing back in one of the following areas: development, documentation, infrastructure, localization, quality assurance, design or marketing.

Enterprise Deployments

LibreOffice 6.2.4 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is not optimized for enterprise class deployments, where features are less important than robustness. Users wanting a more mature version can download LibreOffice 6.1.6, which includes some months of back-ported fixes.

Organizations looking for an enterprise class application backed by support and service level agreements (SLA) should source a LibreOffice LTS (Long Term Supported) version from those TDF Advisory Board members who provide this product (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/).

Also, value-added services for enterprise class deployments – related to software support, migrations and training – should be sourced from certified professionals (https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

Sourcing software and/or services from the ecosystem of certified professionals represents the best support option for enterprises deploying LibreOffice on a large number of desktops. In fact, these activities are contributed back to the project under the form of improvements to the software and the community, and trigger a virtuous circle which is beneficial to users and all other stakeholders.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.2.4

LibreOffice 6.2.4 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.9. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 6.2.4 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice Online at OW2con 2019

OW2con 2019 is the annual open source event bringing together the OW2 community, technology experts, software architects, IT project managers and decision-makers from around the world. The conference will be hosted by the Orange Gardens Innovation Center, Paris-Châtillon, on June 12-13, 2019.

The central theme of OW2con 2019 is: “Open Source Toward Industry Maturity”. Indeed, with open source becoming mainstream, IT developers, vendors, users and even open source organisations such as OW2 have to adapt. Today, open source projects are becoming increasingly competitive and all IT developers, vendors and users must have an open source strategy.

During OW2con 2019, The Document Foundation and LibreOffice Online will be presented during two different talks:

  1. Breakout SessionAdding LibreOffice To Your Online Solution, managed by Michael Meeks (Collabora), Philippe Hemmel (Arawa) and Thorsten Behrens (CIB), on Wednesday June 12, from 1:45pm to 3:45pm.
    LibreOffice Online can be integrated into cloud solutions, as in the case of Nextcloud, ownCloud, Pydio and Seafile. The software is 100% open source and can be the perfect solution for GDPR issues in organizations. During the session it will be possible to get an overview of the application, and ask both technical and business-related questions.
  2. TalkIntroducing The Document Foundation, by Simon Phipps (TDF/OSI), on Thursday June 13, from 9:45am to 10:00am.
    The Document Foundation is one of OW2’s newest Affiliate organisations, and is a global charity based in Germany that works to promote open source productivity tools. Its flagship project, LibreOffice, is available across major desktop platforms and continues the fourth decade of impact from the code that started life as Star Writer on CP/M.

More information about OW2con 2019 are available on the event website: https://www.ow2con.org/view/2019/.

Next C++ workshop: Binary Search Trees, 23 May at 18:00 UTC

Learn C++ features with the help of LibreOffice developers! We’re running regular workshops which focus on a specific topic, and are accompanied by a real-time IRC meeting. For the next one, the topic is Binary Search Trees. Start by watching this presentation:

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And check out the suggested EasyHacks.

Then join us for a discussion via our #libreoffice-dev IRC channel. You can ask experienced LibreOffice developers questions, and learn more about the language. We look forward to meeting you!

Month of LibreOffice, May 2019 – half way through!

It’s the Month of LibreOffice, and we’re awarding sticker packs – and the chance to win cool mugs – to all contributors in the project! On this page we’re maintaining a list of names/usernames for people who’re helping out, and everyone there can claim a sticker pack at the end! We’ll also choose 10 people at random to get one of the mugs. So, how many packs have been awarded so far?

But there are still two weeks to go, so if your name isn’t there, check below to see how you can get involved! Many tasks only take 10 or 20 minutes, but make a big difference to the project. (And if you have already contributed this month, but your name isn’t there, email us with details and we’ll look into it.)

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users: over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the office suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 6.2.3”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice!)
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting/tooting!)
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker as thanks from us. We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks!