Berlin, February 11, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.1.5, for Windows, MacOS X and Linux, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family targeted to large deployments in enterprises and public administrations (which should always be supported by TDF certified developers: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/developers/).
Meet the Community
From March 10 to March 14, The Document Foundation will exhibit at CeBIT in Hannover (Hall 6, Booth H14) to showcase LibreOffice 4.2 and LibreOffice 4.1.5. In addition, Florian Effenberger and Italo Vignoli will speak about LibreOffice at the Open Source Conference, of the project infrastructure and of a reference protocol for large migrations.
Support The Document Foundation
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 expand the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
2013 has been one of the best years for LibreOffice in Brazil
and it is becoming even better.
The Brazilian community outperformed itself in all kind of activities around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation during 2013. We attended ten events, signed an important agreement and got our first LibreOffice certified developer. It was also time to start looking at our neighbors in Latin America.
Events
We participated in ten events sponsoring activities in LibreOffice. The FLISOL 2013 in Brasilia to invite new developers to join our development. The FSLDC 2013 in Duque de Caxias, promoting LibreOffice to a broad audience of users and developers. The Document Freedom Day 2013 was also coordinated by the Brazilian community in Rio de Janeiro and sponsored by SINDPD-RJ.
FSLDC Duque de CaxiasFLISOL – Brasília: Call for new developers. From left to right: Deivi Kuhn, Henderson Matsuura, Olivier HallotThe Document Freedom Day in Rio de Janeiro. From left to right: Eliane Domingos, Marcelo Soriano and Marcio Monteiro
The Lecture Cycle of SINDPD-RJ regularly talked on LibreOffice new developments on each major release in 2013, accessing a focused set of IT professionals and FOSS advocates. The Santa Catarina State LibreOffice community also had its 2nd LibreOffice Meeting that included a hack day for students interested in starting to contribute code to LibreOffice and the SOLISC (in the same state) also had lectures on LibreOffice, lead by Klaibson Ribeiro.
Then we had our major event, FISL 14 in July 2013, where we brought Italo Vignoli, Bjoern Michaelsen and Olivier Hallot of The Document Foundation Board of Directors to lecture on LibreOffice migrations, LibreOffice community engagements and LibreOffice development. At the same event the State of Rio Grande do Sul and The Docuemnt Foundation agreed to partner for the deployment of Open Document Formats and LibreOffice within the State public administration, aiming a few hundred thousands desktops.
FISL 2013: The State of Rio Grande do Sul adopts ODF and LibreOffice as document edition format and tool of choice.FISL 2013: Community gathering at the largest opensource event in Brazil: From left to right: Olivier Hallot, Bjoern Michaelsen, Italo Vignoli (TDF), Dr. Richard Stallman (FSF), Eliane Domingos, Gustavo Pacheco, David Jourdain (LibreOffice community)
Next in August we had the CONSEGI, in Brasilia, where the federal public administration get together to deal with a broad set of issues related to FOSS, and where our Chairman Florian Effenberger was invited as keynote speaker, together with most of the Brazilian community to run lectures, workshops and round-tables on FOSS and LibreOffice. The Document Foundation represented by Florian and Ms Eliane Domingos received the “Demoiselle” Award in recognition of the contribtion for the communities of open source software.
CONSEGI 2013: The “Demoiselle” award for achievements in the OpenSource community to The Document Foundation (Florian Effenberger) and Eliane Domingos (LibreOffice Brazilian community)
In October, we ran the LibreOffice show and partied for its 3rd birthday in Latinoware, an event that happens in Foz do Iguaçu, in the triple border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, sponsored by Itaipu Binacional, the company that operates the massive Itaipu hydroelectric dam. This event is a gathering of several nationals interested in promoting FOSS among their citizens and a project to translate LibreOffice to guarani, the native language of Paraguay, emerged.
Celebrating LibreOffice Anniversary in LatinoWare 2013: from left to right: Julio Neves, Eliane Domingos, Vitorio Furusho, Klaibson Ribeiro and João Fernando
Finally we attended CISL-2013, the Argentinian congress for open source in Buenos Aires to deliver 3 lectures on LibreOffice achievements, on migrations, development and community gathering, in an effort to stimulate the Argentinian community to get more active.
CISL 2013 in Buenos Aires: Olivier Hallot (TDF) sharing experience in migrations for large organizations.
Development
All events of 2013 also aimed to harvest new developers for LibreOffice. From initial compilation to the first patches, the developer community grew in quantity and quality. We were able do send two Brazilian developers to Freiburg, Germany to participate in the Freiburg Hackfest. We were happy that Marcos Souza got his LibreOffice Developer Certification.
The high profile developer team in Freiburg Hackfest: Michael Stahl, Marcos Souza, José Guilherme Vanz, Stephan Bergman and Eike Rathke
Community
The community also has it say in 2013. The documentation team leaded by Raul Pacheco and Vera Cavalcante finished the translation of the Writer and Calc User Manual. This is a huge effort that the Brazilian collaborators undertake to bring knowledge to end-users, not only in Brazilian Portuguese but also for the broader Portuguese-speaking community.
The LibreOffice Magazine, an e-magazine in PDF writen and edited by the Brazilian community leaded by Eliane Domingos e Vera Cavalcante, released 6 editions on time with more than 70 A5 pages each full of information on open source software in general, LibreOffice tutorials and case studies for migration and deployments. This magazine is actually edited on a collaboration basis and is not funded by advertisements or any other means. We recorded an average of 20.000 downloads of the magazine on each edition and we have 449 followers of the magazine twitter account.
Celebrating the 3rd anniversary of LibreOffice and the 1st of LibreOffice Magazine
Responding to the trend towards social networks, the community also gathered around LibreOffice in FaceBook, Twitter and Google+. In these profiles, we have 1900 followers in the LibreOffice facebook page as well as 1400 more in the LibreOffice Facebook group. On Twitter, we have 1800 followers and 1328 in Google+.
Last, but not least, the year ended with the Document Foundation Board of Director elections where our colleague Eliane Domingos was elected. That will make 2014 even better to follow!
Berlin, February 3, 2014 – LibreOffice Impress Remote for iPhone/iPad is now available on the iTunes Store. The app allows to use your smartphone to remotely manage the LibreOffice Impress presentation running on your laptop, by showing a miniature of the slides on the screen and allowing to navigate back and forth by sweeping right and left with your fingers. In addition, you can also visualize the presenter’s notes.
LibreOffice Impress Remote for iPhone/iPad is compatible with the recently announced LibreOffice 4.2 for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You can use the app – developed by Siqi Liu, a brilliant Google Summer of Code student – with any desktop version of LibreOffice.
“With the announcement of LibreOffice Impress Remote for iPhone/iPad, which supplements the already available app for Android, launched in January 2013 and available on Google Play Store since then, we make another step forward to make LibreOffice users happy”, says Florian Effenberger, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Today, thanks to our apps, we can potentially reach over 1 billion smartphone users worldwide with the LibreOffice brand”.
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 grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
Berlin, January 30, 2014 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.2, a new major release targeted to early adopters and another significant step forward for the best free office suite ever. LibreOffice 4.2 features a large number of performance and interoperability improvements targeted to users of all kinds, but particularly appealing for power and enterprise users. In addition, it is better integrated with Microsoft Windows.
Calc has gone through the largest code refactoring ever, giving major performance wins for big data (especially when calculating cell values, and importing large and complex XLSX spreadsheets), while an optional new formula interpreter enables massively parallel calculation of formula cells using the GPU via OpenCL. The latter works best with a Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) such as the new AMD Kaveri APU.
Round-trip interoperability with Microsoft OOXML, particularly for DOCX, as well as legacy RTF, has also improved considerably. Also, new import filters for Abiword documents and Apple Keynote presentations have been added.
LibreOffice 4.2 offers two Windows specific improvements for business users: a simplified custom install dialog to avoid potential mistakes, and the ability to centrally manage and lock-down the configuration with Group Policy Objects via Active Directory. All users benefit from better integration with Windows 7 and 8, with thumbnails of open documents now grouped by application and a list of recent documents, both showing on the task bar.
Power users on all platforms will like the flexibility of the Expert Configuration window, which has been added to the Advanced Options tab. This feature can be easily turned off, for large deployments and basic users.
LibreOffice 4.2 offers a new Start screen, with a cleaner layout that makes better use of the available space – even on small screens – and shows a preview of the last documents.
On the mobile side, LibreOffice now supports an Impress Remote Control for iOS – in addition to the already available Impress Remote Control for Android – which allows visual management of presentation delivery on the laptop using the screen of an iPhone or iPad. The app is currently waiting for review from Apple, and will be announced as soon as it is available on iTunes Store.
LibreOffice 4.2 is the first open source suite to ship a new Windows (IAccessible2 based) accessibility feature developed by IBM. This is considered experimental for this release, but will replace legacy Java based accessibility in the next major release.
The LibreOffice User Interface continues to undergo significant cleanup with 70% of our dialogs now refreshed and many distributed UI tweaks. This release also includes a beautiful new “flat” icon theme – Sifr – and an updated set of default document styles.
In early February, the LibreOffice community will gather at FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels, where developers will present at the Open Document Editors DevRoom the latest and greatest technologies integrated by LibreOffice, and other volunteers will meet free software advocates at the LibreOffice booth.
In early March, The Document Foundation will exhibit at CeBIT in Hannover to showcase LibreOffice 4.2: Hall 6, Booth H14.
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 grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
Thanks to the efforts of several native language projects and volunteers, this press release is also available in Arabic, Dutch, French, Galitian, German, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish and Turkish from this page: http://blog.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-4-2/. We will add other languages in the future.
Berlin, December 30, 2013 – The Document Foundation is happy to acknowledge that the most recent version of LibreOffice – the best free office suite ever – is available on the iPad and Chromebooks as a cloud application, thanks to rollApp online virtualization technology.
rollApp iPad and Chromebook users don’t download or install the software, as they access LibreOffice inside the browser. rollApp streams an on-demand copy of the office application from its cloud architecture down to the iPad and Chromebooks and allows to work with files (open, save, and edit documents) directly in the cloud storage: Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.
“LibreOffice’s powerful range of document management capabilities plus rollApp’s smart virtualization technology offer our customers and LibreOffice users a new and intelligent way to be more productive on both iPad and Chromebook,” said Vlad Pavlov, rollApp Founder and CEO. “We also want to thank LibreOffice power users for their contribution to helping us to deliver LibreOffice productivity suite on iPad and Chromebook.”
rollApp’s productivity suite debuted in April 2012 by demonstrating how its online virtualization technology can run office applications on the iPad in the cloud. rollApp offers software-on-demand service that delivers existing software to virtually any web-browser-equipped computing or mobile device over broadband/3G/4G/LTE.
About rollApp
rollApp Inc. is a privately held cloud computing technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. rollApp focuses on developing virtualization technology that makes it possible to use a web browser for running desktop applications on any device.
I hereby announce the final results of The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors elections 2013. With the challenging phase having ended without any objection to the preliminary results, the following results are now the final ones.
Elected as member are the candidates, in this order: Thorsten Behrens, Eliane Domingos de Sousa, Michael Meeks, Fridrich Strba, Adam Fyne, Joel Madero and Bjoern Michaelsen. And as deputies: Andreas Mantke, Eike Rathke and Norbert Thiebaud.
I want to say thanks to all those who ran for elections, also the members that were not elected for the board this time, and congratulations to those that were elected. By separate mail each one elected, will be invited to accept the new role as Member (or Deputy) of the Board of Directors.
As outlined in the initial announcement, the newly elected Board of Directors will only be in charge from February 18, 2014 on. To help the transition, the current Board of Directors will include them in the decision making process.
On behalf of the Membership Committee,
Cor Nouws, Chairman
