OfficeBuzz

Time for my notes from the LibreOffice conference 2012 , in Berlin recently. The week was well organised by our friends of the German LibreOffice community. The location was at a ministry, close to station Berlin Hauptbahnhof. And the weather was excellent, so the 10 minutes walk from the hotel to the conference venue could be done in a T-shirt. Mid October :-) So, what items do I really want to mention? First there was the positive key-note by Jeremy Allison from Google . Included in his presentation were two slides that make extremely clear what the value of open source is for Google .. .. and for others too!   A beautiful project is the localization of LibreOffice in Arabic . Because of the language structure, that needs some more attention then just doing the translating. The support for languages with what 'we' call complex text layout (CTL-support – see Tools > Options > Language settings ..) has to be improved on various points. Various spe...

Chances to save millions, but with talking alone you won't get that far   My previous two blogs pointed out that when public administrations make a combined investment in open source software, migrating will become easier, that they themselves profit as well as all other (government) users will do. Governments from Germany and Switzerland already do so . In The Netherlands municipalities can save millions of Euro's each year, with open source office software alone. Now tomorrow, September 12, we have national elections in the Netherlands. In relation to that the topic open source has, as far as I've noticed, been touched by the parties GroenLinks and SP. Besides that, also the party PvdA mentions it and of course it's important for the Piratenpartij. [1]   The past has shown that for the most parties open source software (and open standards) are important. But how useful is 'attention'? It would be really helpful if the new Tweede Kamer (parliament) wou...

Millions to be saved each year with the use of open source office-software   In the previous article I wrote about administrations in Germany and Switzerland that invest in open source software. In a combined project they improve interoperability of LibreOffice and OpenOffice with the latest file formats of Microsoft Office. These administrations almost literally put their hands at work in the important field of open source software. What can I write about the situation at Dutch administrations in this field? The use of open source software in Dutch municipalities can be seen in various parts. At the backside it is done in the form of servers and management systems for websites. And on the desktop one sees Firefox and Zarafa , that is increasingly gaining popularity as Exchange/Outlook replacer.   The use of open source office software is not yet widely spread and it grows slowly. It's exactly this that I want to look at further. Because of my own profession in Nou...

Just before the start of the vacations the news was published about several public administrations make a strong investment in open source software. A project was started to improve the interoperability of LibreOffice and OpenOffice with the latest file formats of Microsoft Office. [1] The parties involved invest a sum of 140.000 Euro in the project. That is what open source really is about: as user of a product you can support the development of features that are important for you. Simple, direct. The products quality growths and the value increases too, also for other users. It's logic that administrations too invest in this way in the quality of their tools. The project that we talk about here, is about improving the interoperability. Important, because a insufficient interoperability is a source of frustration and limited freedom. [2] , [3] More freedom in the use of office software is extra important, because that opens the doors to use open source for the desktop. Op...

After several months of working on LibreLex , it was time to test it on MacOS. After all, we claim it does work there too :-) The fiends in the FourDigits office were so friendly to hand me an old Mac. Starting the Mac, browser.. OS-crash.. I remarked: "Hmm, long time ago that I worked on Windows" which of course must be painful to hear for real Mac-fans ;-) So the FourDigits guy was so friendly to lend me his new fast Macbook for a moment. Colleagues already started to mumble ... "how much of your work time will that cost..." OK, LibreOffice was already installed. So we put the folder with the templates and config-files in the user work-path. Double-click on the LibreLex extension to install.. ah, there is the LibreLex tool bar. Start New document with LibreLex.. great. Print with /without logo.. looks good. Dialogues Place and Mail.. fine too. So that's it. Works. Thanks for your help! Two minutes and it just works. "Huh.." Why huh, what's s...

A very subtile nice gradient :-) (looks best when you install it yourself - LibreOffice 3.6.0 beta 3 will be available very soon!)

Roughly a month to go before LibreOffice 3.6.0 will be finished. So it's time for a little excitement :-) An overview (in progress) of the new features is available on the wiki . The community – users as you and I – is of course assisting with tracing the bugs in the beta releases. Therefore there will be an international bug-hunt party organized on July 6 and 7! According to the plan - and with LibreOffice the plan is usually met - the release will be in the first week of August. Such a first release is of course perfect to give it a good try, but obviously not to deploy immediately in all business processes. Just be careful ;-) The 3.6.0 – I'm looking forward to it!

I am one of a generation in which openness grew. Open communication, and still attempting to be true. Those themes were 'hot'. And luckily, such a period is not unique. Of course there always are processes in which it is impossible to be fully open at any moment. Some topics are sensible business wise or political and can better be traded with in a small committee. It went pretty well with the 'openness' as far as I am concerned. Also in hierarchical relations: child – parent, employee – boss, citizen – government. I wanted to talk a bit more about that government. Not with thoughts about 'open politics' and 'behind closed doors' being objectionable or not. That's something I can do at other places. Here I want to talk about our authorities and open data and open tools. As a result of the growing awareness in the society around IT and the costs and risks of closed software and closed file-formats, the Dutch Parliament in that time expressed itself i...

(read this blog in Dutch) Today 8 years ago I launched my company Nou&Off: dedicated to support for OpenOffice and the last years of course increasingly LibreOffice. Before that, I worked in a company providing consultancy for larger projects in Ms Word. But my ideas about fair policy did not really match with that from the guys in Redmond. So after a while, I ended up in the open source market. Relatively new too me, so I learned a lot. 8 years also means quite some projects in larger and smaller organisations, which adds some experience too. I've seen successes and failures in migrations. Of course the complexity of the automation always is a factor that has large influence on all that has to be done. And the focus of the involved employees in the project, is a key for success or failure. Sometimes the idea settles that it's not important to look early and consistent at certain possible issues. Or unexpectedly other (more important?) projects take the focus from the offi...

On Saturday, March 31, six members of the Dutch Language community gathered for a next Hackers event. Alas, due to family circumstances I was unable to join, but Luc kindly send me this report of the event: " The session was hosted by Hans de Vries, in his office near Utrecht, Netherlands, quickly after arrival we fired up our laptop's got the Wifi going and departed on our journey. Two streams of activities quickly developed, one on hacking the code itself, another one around documentation. We worked on both during the whole day, spend a significant amount of time on getting to know each other: "who are you", "what is your background", etc. Code work was done on some patches for code improvement and curing build errors in debug mode. Working from home via the Internet this personal contact is valuable and helps to speed up the interaction and hence our output! We left late afternoon with our personal batteries charged and thanked Hans for his hospitality....

When I'm sitting in the train, or even better, on a sunny terrace, I see many heads bound, The thumbs and fingers move swiftly over de screens of the newest gadgets, that are used nowadays to share our information. Little tweed, Apps, site here and there... Who talks about sustainability of digital documents in this world? Still there is the DocumentFreedomDay . For years already. And I was invited there to present LibreOffice. It makes fun and is challenging in a time, as is sketched with the first sentences, to be invited to explain why it is important that we, I, you, our society in twenty, sixty, three hundred years still can have access to the information that we currently consider important enough to spend our precious time on. And that you will be able to use these documents, also now, without being forced to spend money to do so. To me, that always is the linking step to the need of a powerful office-application that works with free, open document standards. So that people ...

Free software exists thanks to the involvement of users. For that reason we have regular meetings in our Dutch language community. Working on the items that you like. Or that you consider important. And this is an open, relaxing atmosphere. So, on March 31 there will already be our sixth 'hackers-event'. But since there is a equal amount of people with interest for documentation, I just call it 'hacking and writing'. Well, thinking of the effort that a writer spends on a good text, how strong he must hack in possible features, examples, explanations... One could call that a sort of hacking, isn't it? Don't let the real hackers, the ones that dive diep in all the code, dependencies and more, read this ;-) Ah yes, more information (in Dutch) via this link !

If you would like to read the Dutch version of the announcement and see the translated text on the great graphics by Italo Vignoli ... it is here on my Dutch language blog!