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The importance of ODF during the festive season

LibreOffice Viewer now available on Meta Quest VR headsets

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Czech translation of LibreOffice Draw Guide 25.8

Videos from the Open Source Conference 2025 in Luxembourg

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).

LibreOffice QA Team launch a Bug Triage Contest

The competition will run from June 20th to July 5th, 2013
Berlin, The Document Foundation announce a Bug Triage Contest to prepare for the announcement of LibreOffice 4.1. The event will last two weeks during the availability of the first release candidate of the office suite, from June 20th to July 5th, 2013.
Details of the Bug Triage Contest are available online at the following address on TDF wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Projects/Bug_Triage_Contest (the page is still a work in progress, and will be consolidated before the event).
The top 5 triagers – amongst the known ones – and the first 10 new contributors will win a TDF/LibreOffice T-shirt.

Regione Umbria awarded for the migration to LibreOffice

LibreUmbria, the migration project of Regione Umbria to LibreOffice, has been awarded a prize for innovation – for metholodology and process – as one of top 10 Italian government projects in 2012/2013.

The migration project has been launched in September 2012, and is documented on the project’s website at www.libreumbria.it (only in Italian). So far, the first 1,000 users – on a total of 6,000 for the first stage – have been migrated to LibreOffice at Provincia di Perugia, without any significant problem.

Award to LibreUmbria
The group of LibreUmbria project managers with the medal and the award

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).

LibreOffice happy to work with Coverity Scan results

Spending part of my time to LibreOffice QA, I look over the web page displaying all the commits for LibreOffice code (1) from time to time.
The last months, I saw an large amount of commits related to ‘Coverity’. I remembered that name from years back, in the old OpenOffice.org project.
To explain: Coverity is a project that runs all kind of automated code checks, discovering typical but often hidden programming errors. Memory leaks, but also errors that may cause little, not so often encountered errors for the users. The reports from Coverity are a valuable contribution to – among others – the LibreOffice development process.

The work on using the Coverity reports for LibreOffice is done by a variety of LibreOffice developers, some on the building and testing, others on the other work to fix the issues. In the first months many hundred improvements have been made, making LibreOffice more robust, better. There are still some few thousand issues left however 🙂 So pls get in contact if you like to help with these improvements.

Again it’s lovely to see that core and volunteer developers work together to get thousands of improvements in the LibreOffice code.
Of course in this special case it only can be done with to the work of the Coverity team, that helps open source projects to become more stable and improve quality. Thanks a lot for that!

LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup on May, 11 2013

After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany last month, we are very happy to announce 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. Simon Phipps and Bjoern Michaelsen will be there and have some hopefully interesting topics prepared:

  • “Foundations and Empires” (Simon)
  • “LibreOffice, the Document Foundation, the universe and all the rest” (Bjoern)

We will also have time for some good Q&A, and most importantly: some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project.

We are excited this was made possible in collaboration with the friendly local folks helping us out here (notably and among others: Mike Higashi, Geo Mealer and Alison Chaiken) and hope to meet and greet many of you there.

You are invited, please consider dropping us a note here!

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Open Document Format

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