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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)

LibreOffice community gets free e-mail, Jabber and SIP addresses @libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind LibreOffice, the leading free office suite, today announces the upcoming availability of @libreoffice.org addresses for its members, starting July 1st. To foster the rapidly growing community and help it with their daily engagement, the foundation will provide a variety of free services under this domain. As of today, these are:

  • an e-mail address with a fully-featured IMAP account, alternatively an e-mail forwarder
  • a Jabber/XMPP address for instant messaging
  • a SIP/VoIP account for voice conferencing

Those services will be, beginning July 1st, provided free of charge to all members of The Document Foundation, and are made possible with the generous help of our supporters, whom we’d like to thank on behalf of the community!

The SIP accounts are provided by iptel.org, the free VoIP service since 2002. The Jabber/XMPP accounts, that feature a shared roster for members to see immediately who else is online, are courtesy of ProcessOne, experts in personalized instant messaging, using Hosted.IM platform. The professional e-mail accounts, supporting server-side filtering, shared folders and webmail access, are hosted by the mail server experts of Heinlein Support.

By using this new and free service, the community not only has access to up-to-date communication tools that easen their daily lives, but also can proudly show their support and appreciation for LibreOffice.

Membership at TDF is free and open to everyone who contributes to the community. Join us today at http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/application-for-tdf-community-membership/

All details on applying for the new free service will be made public on July 1st, 2013, and sent out to all eligible members.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.4

Berlin, June 19, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.4, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the fourth minor release of LibreOffice 4.0 family and the last before the announcement of LibreOffice 4.1 in late July.

LibreOffice 4.0.4 features many improvements in the area of interoperability with proprietary document formats. This ongoing activity has been instrumental for the choice of LibreOffice by all major migration projects to free software since early 2012, including several central and local governments in Europe and South America.

LibreOffice 4.0.4 also solves a number of bugs and regressions over the previous release, thanks to the work of QA volunteers. On June 20, the team is launching a 15 day Bug Triage Contest to prepare for the release of LibreOffice 4.1. Details here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Projects/Bug_Triage_Contest. The top 5 triagers – amongst the known ones – and the first 10 new contributors will win a TDF/LibreOffice T-shirt.

LibreOffice 4.1 will introduce many new and exciting features, which are listed here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.1 (including the long awaited font embedding in documents, which is pushing forward the Open Document Format).

In addition, there is a massive amount of improvements less visible to end users but equally important, as cumulatively they add up to a code-base that is far easier to understand and contribute to: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-06-13-under-the-hood.html.

LibreOffice 4.0.4 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/4.0.4/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.4.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.4/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.4.2).

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

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