[LUGOS] [Fwd: [ooo-announce] OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 04 -
Issue 11 - 05/2007]
Robert Ludvik
r at aufbix.org
Thu May 31 07:40:32 CEST 2007
Še nekaj novičk iz sveta OpenOffice.org:
-------- Izvirno sporočilo --------
Zadeva: [ooo-announce] OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 04 - Issue 11
- 05/2007
Datum: Wed, 30 May 2007 17:17:43 +0200
Od: Erwin Tenhumberg <Erwin.Tenhumberg na Sun.COM>
Reply-to: announce na openoffice.org
Za: announce na openoffice.org
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OPENOFFICE.ORG NEWSLETTER
Volume 04 - Issue 11 - 05/2007
Please send news clippings to:
newsletter na marketing.openoffice.org
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For up-to-date news visit the OpenOffice.org Newsletter Blog:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com
To read all of this month's stories in full:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_ooonewsletter_archive.html
ATOM feed:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/atom.xml
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Contents
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1. Announcements
================
* Reminder: OOoCon 2007 Call for Papers Deadline is June 1st
* Press reports regarding "SB/BadBunny-A" virus
2. Success Stories
==================
* OpenOffice.org on Dell PC's
3. Featured News
================
* Hot Topics for Draw/Impress
* New Chart Module is Integrated
* Developer Snapshot of the new ReportDesigner
* On the way to a native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org
* Sun and Redflag Chinese 2000 to Collaborate on OpenOffice.org Projects
* Sun Microsystems joins porting effort for OpenOffice.org for Mac
* Weekend of the German OpenOffice.org QA team
* Forming better Japanese QA team
4. Tips & Tricks
================
* Dmitri Popov: Extend OpenOffice.org
* The OpenOffice.org API Plugin for NetBeans
* Does program logic embedded in documents make sense?
* The quality of OpenOffice.org is not a miracle
5. OpenDocument News Roundup
6. Clippings
All news for this month can be found at:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_ooonewsletter_archive.html
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Want to help OpenOffice.org? Find out hot to contribute or see our
To Do List!!
http://www.openoffice.org/contributing.html
http://development.openoffice.org/todo.html
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Announcements
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Reminder: OOoCon 2007 Call for Papers Deadline is June 1st
==========================================================
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/speakers.html
Press reports regarding "SB/BadBunny-A" virus
=============================================
"However, the OpenOffice.org community repeats the consistent message from
security experts that users should never accept files from unknown
sources. For any security issue, please visit OpenOffice.org's Security
Team page [2] and send a note to security-team na openoffice.org.
[1] http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/sbbadbunnya.html
[2] http://www.openoffice.org/security/"
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=325
Success Stories
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OpenOffice.org on Dell PC's
===========================
"Just in case you did not notice, Dell just started shipping
OpenOffice.org via their Ubuntu bundling. Pretty cool!"
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/openoffice_org_on_dell_pc
Featured News
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Hot Topics for Draw/Impress
===========================
"First of all, I'd like to thank everybody sending me their valuable
feedback regarding my 'Comments on SVG'. Feedback like this is the only
way for us to adjust our priorities, define our feature set and the
roadmap in general. I'm now more convinced than ever, that we need a so
called 'native' support of SVG ASAP. ...
Regarding my current Blog entry, I'd like to share some hot topics we're
currently working on at the Sun OOo Draw/Impress team with you.
The hottest topic for me is definitely the work on our so called
'Professional Presentation Package'. This package will most likely
be available as an OOo extension (to be installed on top of OOo), and
providing an additional set of features that ease both the creation
and the actual presentation of slideshows."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/hot_topics_for_draw_impress
New Chart Module is Integrated
==============================
"Finally, the New Chart made it into the master build!
There are a lot of improvements. For details see the What's New page.
If you like, download the developer snapshot build and give it a try!
In case you discover any problems you can check this list of existing
Issues. You are welcome to submit new issues you find.
Thanks a lot to all contributors. There was plenty of valuable feedback
from testing the milestone builds, suggestions for improvement, articles
for the online help and specification documents. Many thanks to Regina
Henschel, Tony Galmiche, Pierre-André Galmes, Jörg Wartenberg and all
the other people of the OOo community who supported the Sun Chart team."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/new_chart_module_is_integrated
Developer Snapshot of the new ReportDesigner
============================================
"Now some issues are fixed in the Report Designer. You'll find the
install sets here. This time it installs at a different location as
the standard installation.
To make life easier, we created a issuezilla query where you see which
tasks we still have to do (Thanks, Chris and Marc)"
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/new_developer_snapshot_of_the
On the way to a native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org
==============================================
"In the evening I joined the IRC channel of the Mac porting community
of OpenOffice.org to talk to some members. Eric B. asked me if I could
have a look to a new native build he has made with the latest CVS chganges
of the day and I agreed. Again WOW! What a great progress. It really
makes me happy to see the native Mac OS X file picker dialog to load
and save documents. It makes really fun to see no X11 starting in the
background. Never I have hoped to see that so fast!"
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/on_the_way_to_a
Sun and Redflag Chinese 2000 to Collaborate on OpenOffice.org Projects
======================================================================
"Under the provisions of the agreement, Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000,
which produces the popular OpenOffice.org-based RedOffice, will add to
the open source project approximately 50 engineers, some of whom have
been working on the OpenOffice.org project since the second half of 2006."
http://www.pr-inside.com/sun-and-redflag-chinese-2000-to-r133109.htm
Sun Microsystems joins porting effort for OpenOffice.org for Mac
================================================================
"I'm excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will
add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort.
...
You can imagine my excitement when I first heard about renewed efforts
to make an Aqua port reality. And now finally I can spend my paid time
to add to this great effort. At first Herbert Dürr and I will contribute
to the Mac port, however there certainly will be other Sun developers
involved in their areas of expertise when the need arises (e.g. when
problems with the build system arise).
Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look
around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more
and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a
significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this
port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this
port. The new invigorated effort in Mac/Aqua-porting (basically since
CWS aquavcl01) is an obvious indicator. I think this is the right way
to go to make OOo on Mac as good as or even better than the other
ports. Add in the growing Mac community as a whole and suddenly from
Sun's point of view Mac has a higher value since our strategy is to
be multi-platform capable."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/sun_microsystems_engineering_joins_porting
Weekend of the German OpenOffice.org QA team
============================================
"In the evening we had a 'bughunting party' until ~01:30am. We tried to
use the build bots to compile a new build but failed (AFAIK the build bot
had a configuration problem). Jacqueline and Simon Wilper then started to
do a Linux build on Jacqelines' notebook. By using SRC680_m211 build we
were able to verify issues of child workspaces that were integrated into
this version. Some people confirmed issues, some closed verified issues
and some filed new issues. It was really fun to work together with a
fairly big team at such an event."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/weekend_of_the_german_openoffice
Forming better Japanese QA team
===============================
"I was really impressed by the QA team of DE.
Weekend of the German OpenOffice.org QA team, and motivated very much.
Recently I have been working on how we Japanese team
do better QAs.
* how we define QA tests/protocole for Japanese
* how we find volunteers
* how we do not exhaust good QA testers and QA managers."
http://blog.livedoor.jp/maho_nakata/archives/50658554.html
Tips & Tricks
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Dmitri Popov: Extend OpenOffice.org
===================================
"Extending OpenOffice.org's functionality using extensions is nothing
new. From the very beginning, users could add new features to the office
suite by installing so-called UNO packages. Usually, these packages
contained OOo Basic code, and they offered a more straightforward way of
integrating macros into OpenOffice.org applications. With the release of
OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, the idea of adding new features via installable
packages has been rethought thoroughly and aligned with a concept that
is more familiar to end users-namely the extension architecture of the
Mozilla Firefox browser."
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9412
The OpenOffice.org API Plugin for NetBeans
==========================================
"If you know the plugin from its humble beginnings, formerly named OOo
Extension Plugin, you'll be amazed by what we have already achieved:
The OpenOffice.org API Plugin has finally reached version 1.0.0 and is
available officially in the NetBeans Update Center. So, if you are
curious (and why shouldn't you be?), give it a try:
Either click on Tools - Update Center in NetBeans, see that "NetBeans
Update Center" is selected in the list of available centers and click
Next. You can find the plugin in the Features section as "OpenOffice.org
API Plugin".
Or go to the NetBeans Portal Page and download, the page is linked at
the end of this text.
After installing the Plugin, you are greeted by a dialog that wants
the paths to the OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice.org SDK installation.
Enter or Browse to those and the Plugin will work fine."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/the_openoffice_org_api_plugin
Does program logic embedded in documents make sense?
====================================================
"Documents should be used as data container only, and the file format
specification defines how the content should be displayed in different
applications handling this file format. At least for documents which
should be shared with others and/or other applications it would be a
good approach to keep program logic out of the documents.
Automation of document centric workflows make sense and is necessary
of course, but you should think about the usage of embedded macros
versus macros deployed in office installations directly. Deploy the
macro libraries inside your company, everywhere where necessary but
keep it out of the document."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/does_program_logic_embedded_in
The quality of OpenOffice.org is not a miracle
==============================================
"Many activities were initiated since OOo 2.0. One of the biggest wins
was the integration of the crash reporter tooling in OpenOffice.org and
StarOffice. With this tooling many critical crashes were identified
quickly. The most critical and most reported crashes could be fixed in
the next release/update ( some data I brought up in one blog ). Another
hard work was to eliminate all compiler warnings from the code. All
these warnings are hints for potential crashes or other critical issues.
Until now the code isn't warning free in all cases, but with OOo 2.3 the
developers will nearly finalize that project. ' Valgrind '-warning free
code is another project. A run with Valgrind identifies additional
errors in coding which could lead to buffer overflows or other critical
issues. Some of the generated issues are fixed now, but this project is
still in progress. Last but not least continuous code reviews are made
by Sun developers. All other teams which contributed to OOo could find
our accepted coding guidelines for C++ on OOo wiki.
These are activities to stabilize the product. In my daily work I
notice this extremely. I didn't crash at working with released versions
or developer snapshots in the past months."
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/the_quality_of_openoffice_org
OpenDocument News Roundup
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ODF for OS/2
============
OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 including ODF support, AFAIK, is now available for
OS/2. Unfortunately it's not free like for the other platforms. More
details can be found here. Nevertheless, this adds another platform to
the long list of operating systems for which ODF implementations exist.
ANSI/INCITS accepts comments regarding Ecma Office Open XML
===========================================================
"I wonder who provided the template for the comments regarding OOXML
that have arrived at ANSI/INCITS during the last few days. Many comments
have almost identical wording in the beginning. The comments can be
found here.
I guess, ANSI/INCITS is mainly interested in comments from people in
the US, but if you want to send in your comments as well, you can
probably send your emails to this person. At least that email address
shows up on several of the other comments."
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/ansi_incits_accepts_comments_regarding
ODF in the sky
==============
"ODF files can now easily be created on air planes as well, even without
a notebook."
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/odf_in_the_sky
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/picture_staroffice_on_singapore_airlines
Why ODF is a safe bet!
======================
"Even applications like Firefox and Microsoft Office can be used to view
and/or create ODF files. For example the Sun ODF plug-in for Microsoft
Word makes opening and saving ODF files with Microsoft Word 2003 a
seamless task. A version of the Sun ODF plug-in that supports Excel and
Powerpoint as well as older office versions is currently being tested
by beta customers, with increasingly positive feedback. Thus, ODF can
be used independent of platform, application and vendor preferences.
Sure, interoperability between different ODF implementations is not 100%
perfect yet, either because a few applications don't implement every ODF
feature or because ODF still needs some optimization. However,
considering the current ODF momentum, ODF can be expected to evolve
and mature very quickly! "
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/why_odf_is_a_safe
Yet another ODF implementation
==============================
I was told by Rick Walker, the President of Thoughtslinger Corporation,
via email that Thoughtslinger implements ODF. Here is a quote from
his email:
"We're a small Toronto-based startup and we've built a new simultaneous
group editor that heavily uses the .odt format. Everyone in a team works
on the same document at the same time, and everyone sees what everyone
else is doing as they do it."
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/yet_another_odf_implementation
More software with ODF support
==============================
"New Web Services support enables organizations to easily build their
own applications on top of the BioXM server, further leveraging this
central inventory of information based on a user-created, extendible
scientific knowledge model. The updated BioXM client application ensures
a highly personalized work experience, adding new support for Mac OS X(R)
as a client platform and extended data exchange capabilities now
supporting OpenDocument formats."
I found the news herehere. Please let me know when you find new
applications supporting ODF! Thanks!
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/more_software_with_odf_support
The Standards Council of Canada is asking for comments regarding
Ecma Office Open XML
================================================================
As can be read here, the Standards Council of Canada is asking for
comments regarding Ecma Office Open XML. This is an interesting and
smart move, I think, because any committee will always have only
limited knowledge and expertise.
For example, I'm a member of the SC34 mirror committee at the German
national standards body DIN, but I fully admit that I don't know
exactly what all the short, mid and long term needs of private and
public sector users are. Most likely no vendor representative will!
Unfortunately most private or public sector organizations don't want
to or cannot join standards bodies simply because they don't have the
time or money, or at least they believe they don't. Therefore, I think
it's great to see that the Standards Council of Canada opens up the
process and invites non-members to provide input into the process.
Since standards decisions often lead to national standards
recommendations and thus can have a huge impact on how tax money is
spent and competition evolves, it's important that as many parties as
possible participate in the standards process.
It's like with national elections. If citizens don't vote and thus
express their opinion, powerful minorities will be able to take over.
Therefore, people should participate, independent of their point of
view, so that all opinions are being heard.
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/the_standards_council_of_canada
Picture of the Open XML spec
============================
Pavel Janik has a nice picture of the Open XML spec on his blog:
http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2007/05/19/T20_32_07/
The Pointless Office Converter Delay
====================================
"Right now, Microsoft is pushing hard to get ISO (International
Organization for Standardization) standards certification for OOXML.
How is it that OOXML can be a standard if Microsoft doesn't even fully
support the format in a major version of Office? Irreconcilable is the
push for standards and not fully supporting the format up for standards
approval.
Meanwhile, Microsoft makes big noise about interoperability. What kind
of example does Microsoft set when the formats for its Mac and Windows
Office suites aren't interoperable? Irreconcilable is the position of
increased Microsoft-and-other platform interoperability and the
decreased interoperability between Office file formats across two platforms.
Microsoft can argue that there will be interoperability later this year.
For enterprises mixing Office 2004 and 2007, later isn't soon enough."
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_applications/the_pointless_office_converter_delay.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535
ODF to be recommended in Norway
===============================
"Norway is the latest European country to move closer to mandatory
government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided
in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins
Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a
final decision to require such use. The text of the press release, as
well as some of the statements made at the press conference where the
announcement was made, are appended at the end of this blog post.
The Norwegian recommendation was revealed by Minister of Renewal Heidi
Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards
Council. If adopted, it would require all government agencies and
services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats
(such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity. Reflecting
a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC
JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to "promote the convergence
of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering
the same usage."
According to the press release, the recommendation will be the subject
of open hearings, with opinions to be rendered to the Cabinet before
August 20 this summer. The Cabinet would then make its own (and in
this case binding) recommendation to the Norwegian government."
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070513180219689
Happy Birthday ODF!
===================
ODF just turned two! Happy Birthday!
Michael Brauer wrote a longer blog entry about what happened around ODF
over the last two years.
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/happy_birthday_odf
Interoperability by Design
==========================
"So any future operations the user performs on the document, such as
mailing, saving, posting to a web server, etc., will be in OOXML format.
The only way to get back to an ODF format file is to manually and
explicitly go back to the Office menu, go to the ODF submenu and choose
to save it to ODF format. At that point you will be presented a default
name based on the DOCX temp file name, not the original name. In this
case, it suggested “sampler_tmp1.odt”.
The “Save as ODF...” dialog will default to the directory last used to
save a file, not necessarily the same as where your document was loaded
from. So to save you must first navigate to your original document,
select it and choose “yes” when warned about overwriting an existing
document, and then the document is converted back into ODF format."
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/05/interoperability-by-design.html
So where are all the OOXML documents?
=====================================
"As you can see, ODF has a nice upward trend. OOXML is also trending
upwards, though it is somewhat lost at this scale. If you do the analysis
it comes out to around 300 new ODF documents per day versus 6 for OOXML.
So, two years later, ODF adoption, in terms of documents per day, is
50-times greater than OOXML is, at a time which should be OOXML's
high-growth period, considering all the great news that is coming out
of Redmond.
So I'm a somewhat at a loss to appreciate the significance of Novell or
Corel adding OOXML support to their editors. With only 63 OOXML
spreadsheets out there, wouldn't it be cheaper just to hire someone to
retype the documents in the destination application? The average user
is more likely to find a Buffalo Nickel in their lunch change than to
find an OOXML document outside of captivity."
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/05/so-where-are-all-ooxml-documents.html
Clippings
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* New Zealand could invest the $100M in OpenOffice.org development
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/new_zealand_could_invest_the
* Simon Phipps about software patents
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2135483,00.asp
* Jonathan Schwartz blogs about OpenOffice.org
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/censoring_free_media_or_fighting
* The Register, Groklaw and CBR about the Microsoft news
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/the_register_and_groklaw_about
* Jonathan Schwartz about the power of open source
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/jonathan_about_the_power_of
* Greg Papadopoulos blogs about software patents
http://blogs.sun.com/Gregp/entry/are_software_patents_useful
* Japan's IPA Accepts List of Requirements
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/2007/05/japans-ipa-accepts-list-of-requirements.html
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