LibreOffice monthly recap: September 2018

Here’s our regular recap of events and updates in the last month!

  • From 25 to 28 September, our Albanian community organised the LibreOffice Conference 2018 in Tirana. They did an excellent job, so we’d like to give a special thanks to all the organisers for their help! The conference brought together developers, users and supporters from across the world – see the conference website for full details and the programme. Talks and presentations were filmed, so we’ll work on editing and uploading them in the next couple of weeks – keep an eye on the blog!

  • Throughout the event, we posted regular updates on the blog, including photos from day 1, day 2 and day 3. We’ll post a recap video soon, but in the meantime check out the group photo shot of over 100 of the attendees who were present on day 3:

  • During the conference, we also announced LibreOffice 6.1.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 6.1 family, targeted at early adopters, technology enthusiasts and power users. A big thanks to all our community members and certified developers who contributed to this release.
  • Meanwhile, LibreOffice release engineer Christian Lohmaier gave a talk at droidcon Vienna about LibreOffice Viewer for Android. We’re always looking for more help to improve the app and make the experimental editing mode a standard feature, so if you’re familiar with coding Android apps and want to give us a hand, get started here.

  • On September 18, we celebrated the International Day Against DRM. Digital “Rights” Management (which could also be called “Restrictions” Management) is a set of technologies to limit and control users. The Document Foundation supports the International Day Against DRM as part of its daily fight to make content sharing available to all individuals, and to educate them to adopt open standards to foster innovation.
  • Our documentation community released the Getting Started Guide 6.0, an introductory text covering all of the main components in LibreOffice. If you want to learn more about the suite and discover some features you may not have come across, check it out! It’s available in digital and printed formats.

  • Finally, as part of our regular “Community Member Monday” posts, we talked to Battsengel Ichinnorov, a new TDF member, who helps to localise LibreOffice for Mongolian users.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help us to make LibreOffice even better!

LibOCon 2019

LibOCon 2019 will be in Almería, a sunny, lovely city on the south-east coast of Spain. On the shores of the Mediterranean sea, the city was founded in 955 by Abd-ar-Rahman III, who ordered the construction of the famous Alcazaba (the Citadel), one of the largest moorish castles in Europe. The modern city has grown over the hills that surround the Alcazaba, staying true to its visual and architectural tradition.

Almería is also the administrative capital of the homonymous province and part of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. The region is famous for its prolific production of vegetables, having over 100,000 acres of greenhouses in the Poniente province. The city has about 195,000 inhabitants who are welcoming to visitors and always happy to enjoy the city’s excellent weather with a vibrant day and night life.

LibOCon 2019 dates will be communicated as soon as possible.

LibreOffice Conference 2018: Day 3 in pictures

We started the day with presentations – such as LibreOffice’s user experience advantages:

Meanwhile, the Engineering Steering Committee met in person:

Relaxing with pasta for lunch!

And then time for the group photo…

Having fun at the hackfest in the evening:

Now we’re into the final day! Stay tuned…

Announcement of LibreOffice 6.1.2 at LibreOffice Conference

Tirana (Albania), September 27, 2018 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.1.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 6.1 family, targeted at early adopters, technology enthusiasts and power users. The new release was launched during the LibreOffice Conference 2018, in Tirana, the capital city of Albania. LibreOffice 6.1.2 provides around 70 bug and regression fixes over the previous version.

LibreOffice 6.1.2 bug and regression fixes are described in the change log page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.1.2/RC1 (changed in RC1).

Enterprise deployments

LibreOffice 6.1.2 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.

For any enterprise class deployment, TDF maintains the more mature LibreOffice 6.0.6, which should be sourced from a company providing a Long Term Supported version of the suite (they are all members of TDF Advisory Board, and are listed here: https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/).

Also, value-added services for migrations and trainings, to support enterprise class deployments in large organizations, should be sourced from certified professionals (list available here: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice is deployed by large organizations in every continent. A list of some large or significant migrations announced in the media is available on the TDF wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.1.2

LibreOffice 6.1.2 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 6.1.2 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

LibreOffice Conference 2018: Day 2 in pictures

We welcomed attendees this morning:

Then the opening session began!

Erion Veliaj, Mayor of Tirana, joined us to talk about the importance of free and open source software in the city:

Fun and games at lunchtime:

Björn Michaelsen and Florian Effenberger celebrated 20 years of the Open Source Initiative:

Meanwhile, Heiko Tietze gave a talk about recent user interface improvements in LibreOffice:

See you tomorrow!