Blogs | Open Document - Online Community for the OpenDocument OASIS Standard

Working on Calc Performance Bottlenecks

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:26:23 -0500

Users sometimes rightly complain about the time it takes to load and calculate complex spreadsheet documents. Recently I worked on profiling documents to identify performance bottlenecks. The first outcome is summarized on the specific bottlenecks wiki page. You will like to hear that the Zaske case how I call it, where Excel needed 1.2s and Calc 24s to update results, is solved and Calc now, in a CWS, is on a level with Excel.

The next weeks, except for getting some CWSs ready for QA and pending work done for the ODF formula subcommittee, I'll mainly focus on changing implementation and do further profiling. I'm quite sure there are several opportunities for improvement left..

We now use a CMS and so can you…

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:17:49 -0500

After some time of long and intensive work, we completed our migration to our new infrastructure. We migrated our corporate website to a new server and we moved from a FreeBSD-powered server running Caudium to a Gentoo platform with Apache running on top of it. You won’t notice much, except for the language selector. However we changed everything under the hood. Our website was minimalistic and Caudium made it fast.

We now use the Ikaaro CMS for our website and will soon use its facilities such as calendar and corporate wiki for everyday operations. Ikaaro is developed by our good friends at Itaapy, a french FOSS company that is located exactly on the other side of the hill of Montmartre, where Ars Aperta is also located. Ikaaro is very easy to use and I encourage everyone to take a look at the tools developed by Itaapy: they’re GPL v3 and some are actually ODF-centric. Last but not least, our community web site wich hosts many things (although it’s not being advertised enough) and used to host one of the Pootle servers for OpenOffice.org will stay the same and does not migrate.

I would like to thank everyone at Itaapy and Ars Aperta for this work; stay tuned for announcements related to both Ars Aperta and Itaapy in the future.

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Some Calc features for 3.1 from RedFlag 2000

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:34:56 -0500

It was a great pleasure to meet RedFlag 2000's Calc developers at OOoCon in Beijing. Of course the successful collaboration continues, resulting in some cool new features:

When typing a formula, a little tip help window now shows the syntax for the function that is edited.
In addition to the same zoom slider in the status bar that Writer has had since 3.0, in the page preview, we have a similar slider in the toolbar to quickly modify the print scale.
Sorting now preserves the original order of entries with equal sort keys, and it defaults to sorting by the cursor position's column, making the toolbar sort buttons much more useful.
There are some improvements to formula calculation, for INDIRECT and array formulas.

The formula features are in CWS "odff05", the other features in CWS "calc47", both scheduled to go into 3.1.

Daily Links 11/14/2008 (p.m.)

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:30:05 -0500

Doug Mahugh : ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC (OIC TC) “I’ve had a few people ask recently whether Microsoft would be participating in the OIC TC, and I’m glad to report that as of today we’ve signed up.” Excellent news, Doug. The ODF train just keeps on rolling! tags: OB, ODF, OASIS, Microsoft Dartmouth Junior Wins County Election - [...]

ODF@WWW - OOo Conf 2008

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:38:42 -0500

It took me a moment to catch my breath again coming back from this years OOo Conference. The Conference really was a great success and I would like to very much thank all the people (Flora, Peter, Mr. Hu, ...) and companies (IBM, Novell, Redflag CH2000, Sun, ...) who made it happen and who took care of all these little things people come up with during such an event.

Back to ODF@WWW. I luckily had the chance to present on ODF@WWW, which I enthusiastically did. You can download my presentation either as or as . For the ones which were not able to participate (and I think you really missed something :-), you may want to take a look at the recorded talk, I am going to post it here the moment it becomes available.

One important milestone for the ODF@WWW thing now has actually been achieved. Since last week ODF@WWW is an Official Incubator Project :-) You find it's home page at http://odf-at-www.openoffice.org.

Best Regards

Kay

14 Nov 2008 - ODF@WWW - OOo Conf 2008
26 Sep 2008 - ODF@WWW - Becoming an (Incubator) Project
01 Sep 2008 - ODF@WWW - Some State
22 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Going forward ...
04 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Simply Install
27 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW -How it works
19 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW (An ODF Wiki)

So you thought OpenOffice.org controlled ODF? Think again…

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:23:18 -0500

These news are a week old, but I thought it would be wise to have the dust settle a bit before writing about them.
What was announced last week? The OpenOffice.org project had opened a project called the ODF Toolkit. What this project was all about, really, was to design a toolkit for ODF Documents. It included, obviously, the capacity the create applications producing ODF. But the goal was much broader than that; the ODF Toolkit was and is a piece of the essential “plumbing” for processing ODF documents.

In this regard, Sun (as the main copyright holder and steward of the OOo project) decided to have it hosted elsewhere than on OpenOffice.org and emphasize the open aspect of this project. As such, IBM joined the announcement and the project. This is to show that ODF is not “an OpenOffice-thing” as we heard too much in the past.

All in all, this is a very good move. The license of the toolkit has been changed to the Apache License 2.0, which opens the project to the whole Apache ecosystem (and to IBM as well) but still keeps the compatibility with the OpenOffice.org project (OpenOffice.org 3.0 uses the LGPL v3 license). On a strategic point of view, the toolkit aims to be the center for contributions related to ODF applications and ODF platforms. On the OpenOffice.org level, this allows some indirect contributions, as the ODF Toolkit will have obvious influence in the future of OpenOffice.org. Meanwhile, you can learn more and contribute to the future of OpenOffice.org through the ODF @ WWW project, which aims to explore new ways to edit ODF documents and new use cases for OpenOffice.org.

Enjoy!

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Slideshare

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:03:42 -0500

My IBM colleague Adam Christensen introduced me this morning to slideshare.net. Essentially, it’s like youtube but for presentations. It understands PowerPoint, PDF, ODF and a few other formats. While you can view the presentations on the website, you can also embed them in other sites. Here’s an example with the slides I gave at the [...]

Daily Links 11/06/2008 (p.m.)

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:30:18 -0500

Change.gov “Office of the President-Elect” tags: OB, politics IBM, Sun Microsystems Launch ODF Toolkit Union to Grow Adoption, Community and Software Innovation - MarketWatch “The ODF Toolkit will use an initial software code contribution from Sun to provide developers with an easy-to-use Application Programming Interface (API) for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents while accelerating additional application development. One [...]

odftoolkit.org launched

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:43:47 -0500

Today a new project has been announced: odftoolkit.org. I think that's exciting news for ODF. More information regarding odftoolkit.org can be found in the press release.

I have already signed up to odftoolkit.org, and I continue the development of ODF XSLT Runner, the ODF XSLT Runnner Task and the ODF Validator on odftoolkit.org.

ODF Toolkit Union

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:03:29 -0500

Another milestone on the Open Document journey was just announced. Sun and IBM are joining together to sponsor the new ODF Toolkit Union, a collaborative community to develop the tools software developers need to support ODF in their applications. The goal is to make it very easy for any application to embrace ODF and to do so with a collaboratively-developed codebase so that it's really easy to make interoperable documents.

There's a substantial initial code donation there from Sun, including an ODF DOM and a .Net ODF library, all licensed under the Apache License v2. There is also an ODF validator, to help developers check the documents they create are correctly constructed.

Hopefully this will catalyse participation by a very wide range of developers, and promote the spread of document creators and consumers that work smoothly together. If I can clarify things for any organisation wanting to join the Union, get in touch by e-mail (details at the foot of the page). And if you're at ApacheCon, come and find me today and ask.

Daily Links 11/03/2008 (p.m.)

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:30:04 -0500

OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Interoperability and Conformance of OpenDocument Format (ODF) Applications - MarketWatch “BOSTON, Nov 03, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new group to help implementors create applications that conform to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) OASIS Standard. ODF defines a genuinely open XML file format [...]

ODF Update

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:00:00 -0400

Nothing of interplanetary significance to report, I'm glad to report steady progress on all fronts.

As many of you already know, standards maintenance consists of two main activities:

Defect removal through the issuance of corrections to published standards (variously called "errata" or "corrigenda", depending on your zodiacal sign)
Revision, through the issuance of updated (and presumably improved) versions of the standard.

The OASIS ODF TC has been active in both maintenance activities, with some notable milestones in the past week or so on both fronts.

On the maintenance side, Wednesday 29 October saw the start of a 15-day public review for draft 3 of the ODF 1.0 Errata document. The official OASIS announcement has more information on the public review, including links to the errata document itself, as well as how the public may submit comments. JTC1/SC34, though their Secretariat, has also been invited to participate in this review.

Once the public review has concluded, and assuming that no new issues surface in the review, the ODF TC may approved and publish it as "OASIS Approved Errata" as well as transmit the text to JTC1/SC34 for application to ISO/IEC 26300.

On the revision front, the TC continues to work to complete ODF 1.2. But while finishing that revision, we decided that we also want to initiate a new activity related to the next version of ODF, the one after ODF 1.2. We did not have immediate agreement on what that version would be called (ODF 1.3? ODF 2.0?) so we started calling it "ODF-Next". We voted to create a new Subcommittee of the ODF TC, called the ODF-Next Subcommittee to start preliminary background work on this next version, in parallel with the TC's foreground task of completing ODF 1.2. The charter of the new subcommittee reads:

Statement of purpose
--------------------
As the ODF TC completes its work on ODF 1.2, it is desirable to instantiate a parallel effort to gather requirements and define a vision for the next major revision of the standard.

It is the purpose of the ODF-Next Requirements Subcommittee to gather requirements, to categorize these requirements by theme, to prioritize these requirements, and to submit a report to the ODF TC on a recommended set of work items for the next major version of ODF, which will have the working name of "ODF-Next".

Scope of work
-------------
In accordance with the above Purpose, the ODF-Next Requirements SC would undertake the following activities:

To collect requirements for ODF-Next from TC members, from the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, from implementors, from users, from the public, and from other stakeholders;

To ensure that all requirements collected have been formally submitted as contributions to the ODF TC, either as TC member contributions or via the Feedback License;

To categorize these comments according theme;

To prioritize the themes and the requirements within the themes;

To produce and submit to the ODF TC a report on a recommended set of work items for ODF-Next

Bob Jolliffe, from the Department of Science and Technology, South Africa, has agreed to chair the Subcommittee. We had our first meeting last Tuesday.

I think this is going to be exciting. ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1 was about mainly about encoding, in an open standard, the output of conventional productivity applications. If you are a conventional person, running a convention business, with conventional ideas looking for a conventional profit, then great, don't let me wake you up. But I think we need to do more than that. Achieving mere conventional doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. If I wanted to just replicate what others were doing, I'd join the Mono project.

ODF 1.2 starts to break away from that conventional view with its richer view of metadata. But with ODF-Next, we can pull significantly ahead and move into uncharted territory. As Thomas Paine wrote, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

As you can tell, from reading the charter, our primary initial task will be to collect feedback for feature ideas for the next release of ODF. When we formally put out the call for comments, I expect a huge response. So our initial TC meeting was mainly spent discussing ways in which we can can handle a large volume of public comments, in terms of collection, categorizing and prioritizing. Once we agree on a tool to use, and set up some infrastructure to handle the load, expect to hear more on this blog, and elsewhere, about how you can submit your ideas, and help define the capabilities of the next version of ODF.

Next, I'd like to note that the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC (OIC TC) met for the first time last week (and a second time again this week). We elected Bart Hanssens of Belgium as Chair of the technical committee. Bart works for Fedict, the Belgian federal ICT agency, one of the early adopters of ODF. Companies represented on the TC include IBM, Sun, Novell, Google, Oracle, Red Hat, Sursen, Ars Aperta, and the US Department of Defense. We also have a number of individual members.

The greatest difficulty in our initial call was determining a schedule for future meetings. With participants spread out from California to Boston, Paris, Hamburg and Beijing, there is no time which is going to be easy for all of us. The best we could come up with was to meet at 1430UTC, corresponding to 0930 EST, 1530 CET, 2230 China, but 0630 PST (ouch).

In any case, the OIC TC discussions are flowing well, as we start to discuss how we engineer test cases, what data to collect for them, how to encode test metadata, etc. You can follow the discussion in the public archives of the TC's mailing list, or even better, consider joining OASIS ($300 for an individual membership) and participate in this or any other OASIS Technical Committee.

Finally, the ODF Adoption TC has been busily preparing to host a panel discussion and workshop related to ODF interoperability at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing next week. In fact, I should now stop procrastinating and get back to completing by presentations!

If you add it all up: the three ODF-related TC's (ODF TC, ODF Adoption TC, ODF Interop and Compliance TC), we have a combined 79 members, of which 68 represent 25 different OASIS corporate or organizational entities, and the remaining 11 are individual members.

-Rob

Links for the end of October

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:57:55 -0400

I am bit swamped these days, and you must have noticed it by now. These things happen: lots of work items, lots of backlog, and lots of exhaustion as well. Since I don’t want to leave this blog « unattended » for even 2 or three weeks, I am posting today some links I find interesting to visit. Enjoy! I’ll be back soon, by the way…

Microsoft releases Windows Azure. But what is it really? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. It seems it’s a server platform tailored for cloud computing environment. And what is cloud computing? I’m still figuring it out… Seriously, Cloud Computing is the up and coming state-of-the-art in IT. The idea is to use and benefit from data, applications, and networks that are hosted not on your desktop, and not on a server near you. In fact, data and applications are always available but out there, on the Network, in the cloud. Of course, it sounds simple, but it’s very, very complex. It’s a true shift of paradigm, a copernician revolution asking as many questions that it answers, from data portability and users’ rights to virtualized environment and application frameworks. And that’s where players such as Amazon, Joyent and Google are striving. And of course, Microsoft wants to be the dominant player there. So it released a nifty platform that is both a server for running distributed applications and hosting data, and a Microsoft’s Live set of Services. That’s where it’s not clear. They say everything works on Azure, but it seems you better want to use their stuff first. Just like the others, it will work, but… better.
Do you remember the nice subway map picturing the trends of web sites and online services? Well, that map was for 2007. But there’s the new one I completely missed. Enjoy…
There you go. Firefox 3 with the newest javascript engine, and all of a sudden, it actually becomes a fast browser on the Mac! Try Minefield, it’s a surprisingly stable development version of Firefox 3 with a different javascript engine.
Food for thought: I share with them the conviction that large corporation are dwarfing most governments these days. I am no pessimist though: those very same governments could very well come back if they were willing to. But most of them seem to be ideologically blinded, and that’s a pity. Meanwhile, feel free to adhere. It comes from Europe, and it’s free…
Pondering Boycott Novell must be a funny thing to do. But what’s the problem? The news web site is accused by some to be a troll machine, while some others worship it. My view on this is simple: I’m a reader of this web site, and whenever I was involved in some specific situations or was having some solid information on them, I was able to read accurate reports on these. That’s the about the most honest answer I can make. Roy is a good guy, he’s actually taking out the meat and lay it on the table. Should he be doing it in a different fashion, with more style and less passion? Perhaps. Meanwhile, I have more fun reading his prose than the one Mr Byfield regales us with along with his paternalistic advices on why we, the community of freetards & beardies, should learn from big businesses.
People are getting busy preparing the OooCon 2008 in Beijing; for our Asian community, the location makes it an obvious point of focus. But this illustrates how OpenOffice.org has become an international community of choice. Good luck with the conference! And see you next year, OOoCon.
News without a link: OpenOffice.org 2.4.2, the last maintenance release of the 2.x branch, is about to be uploaded. If you don’t want to use the 3.0 (some organization needs time before fully qualifying new versions of office suite), that one is for you. Stay tuned.
News without a link continued: the ISO 26300 (aka ODF 1.0) gets an errata, and you’re welcome to comment on it for the next 15 days. No big news, here again, it’s all about maintenance…

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New in 3.0: xslt based filters as extensions

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 07:10:25 -0400

Some weeks ago I changed the xslt filter code to support the deployment of xslt based import and export filters as extensions, making the awkward XML filter dialog somewhat obsolete. This change became a part of OOo 3.0 and so I'm glad to announce that we have another area of development where extensions offer a fast, easy and flexible way to contribute to the OpenOffice.org project. The growing number of features that can be provided as extensions made me look back a bit and have a little reminiscence.

More than ten years ago (in 1997) the StarOffice development team started to work on UNO, our component technology that enabled us to make StarOffice (and later OpenOffice.org) extensible. At that point in time of course nobody thought about “extensions” like we have them today, but the idea to replace or extend existing functionality (“services”) using configuration or deployment means was one of the main design goals of UNO and UNO APIs. My own part of the API development was the Application Framework API. By its very nature a framework itself does not provide a lot of functionality directly, but instead of this offers APIs to plug it in. So I spent weeks and months together with Michael Hönnig, the former OOo API project lead, to design small and flexible APIs that allow to bind external UNO components to the framework at different places and in different ways. Especially our Dispatch API with its capability to chain DispatchProviders offered a simple, easy-to-implement way to bind external code to commands in the OOo GUI, either existing commands or completely new commands that no code inside OOo could handle. This API was finished and published in 1997 and without some minor complaints I still like it the way we made it. Today it's the backbone of all GUI based extensions and it has proven its simplicity and versatility on many occasions.

The idea of GUI extensions came up nearly at the same time where the UNO team finished their work on “ UNO packages” that we nowadays just call “extensions”. That was somewhere in 2002, on the OOo 1.0.x code line (I don't remember the exact value for “x”). The UNO team and the framework developers though about UNO packages with GUI integration (“like in Mozilla”) and the result were OOo Add-Ons. They brought together UNO packages, the Dispatch and other Framework APIs and some configuration magic. At the end of 2002 we had the first running version of such an Add-On, an extension that could be installed on the command line using the “ pkgchk” tool that was replaced by the “unopkg” tool later. This Add-On integrated itself into the OOo menu bar and had an own tool bar. It was just a demo, so it didn't contain any important functionality. But it worked in OOo 1.1 and it still runs 6 years later in OOo 3.0! Try that with any Firefox extension...

In 2005, at the OOoCon in Koper, we discussed the idea of an OOo extensions repository. It took quite some time to define what we wanted, find developers implementing it and a place to host it – but finally, nearly two OOoCons later, in August 2007 our extensions repository went online. We started with extensions implemented in Java, Basic or C++, meanwhile we also see Python extensions and non-code extensions for templates and dictionaries and perhaps more in the future. And now also xslt. So back to the start of my blog.

Many developers can work with xslt and perhaps some of them might be interested to use them for conversions to or from ODF formats. OOo allows to use xslt as filters since quite some time. Now in OOo3 it will be easy to package them as an OOo extension containing the transformation together with some configuration files. This can be done decoupled from the OOo build process and release cycles and so offers a very fast and easy way to contribute to the project. I've put some documentation about how to create such an extension into our wiki, together with a sample xslt filter extension. A next step (planned, but not scheduled yet) is to change the XML filter dialog to export extensions instead of jars so that no manual editing of configuration files would be needed anymore to create an xslt filter extension. If someone is interested to work on that – just send a mail to the “ dev” list of the framework project.

I hope developers will enjoy this new feature and users will enjoy the new filter extensions that hopefully will arrive at our repository.

BTW: while working on the sample extension I updated and consolidated the documentation about filter development in our Developer's Guide.

The Speech

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:26:09 -0400

Louis Suarez-Potts uploaded the speech he gave on the OOo 3 Launch Party both in English and in French. Mine was given in French for obvious reasons. I thought some of my francophone readers would be interested in it as well. Enjoy!

Bonsoir, et merci à tous d’être là. Je veux tout d’abord adresser mes plus profonds remerciements à la Région Ile de France, à son Président et à son souci apporté à l’innovation technologique durable et responsable. Je veux en particulier remercier Jean-Baptiste Roger dont l’aide et le soutien nous a été précieux. Silicon Sentier, et notamment Paul Richardet, qui a été à nos côtés, ce centre qui bouge, qui fait bouger, qui crée et soutient tous ceux qui entreprennent, découvrent, et font du monde numérique français ce qu’il est.

Plus personnellement, les gens que j’aurais à citer sont nombreux, alors je me cantonnerai à ceux-là: mes parents et Melissa qui sont aussi présents ce soir dans la salle. Ce sont eux qui sont présents dans les bons moments comme dans les moins bons. Il me faut également y rajouter mes collègues d’Ars Aperta, Jerome Dumonteil, Jean-Marie Gouarné et Yvon Rastetter qui sont encore aujourd’hui assez fous pour me supporter.

De façon plus essentielle, je voudrais aujourd’hui remercier toute la communauté OpenOffice.org qui s’investit jour après jour dans notre projet. Louis disait tout à l’heure que nous ne sommes séparés ni par des montagnes, ni par des océans, mais par la seule limite de notre ambition. C’est vrai. Pourtant, notre communauté est présente sur toute la planète, et elle est prête à des sacrifices important pour contribuer au plus grand projet Libre. OpenOffice.org est présent dans le monde entier, et à cette heure-ci, en Birmanie, au Laos, en Chine et dans toute l’Asie, les équipes de localisation et de distribution sont à pied d’oeuvre pour mettre à disposition de tous OpenOffice.org3.0 dans leur langue native; au Brésil, en Afrique, les ingénieurs travaillent déjà pour tenir les meilleurs délais. Et dans la torpeur de la nuit du Gange, notre communauté rêve déjà avec la satisfaction d’avoir contribué à un logiciel libre, instrument de libération, d’émancipation équitable et durable.

Le projet Francophone n’est pas en reste. Je tiens à remercier Sophie Gautier pour sa contribution capitale à OpenOffice.org. Certains le savent, Sophie n’est plus responsable du projet francophone. Mais elle ne nous quitte pas, elle va désormais contribuer au projet différemment, mais de façon tout aussi importante, et je veux le souligner. Merci, Sophie. Je veux d’ailleurs accueillir ici, Jean-Baptiste Faure, l’un des deux nouveaux responsables du projet francophone. Félicitations, Jean-baptiste, et bonne chance.

Cette tribune, ce soir, n’est pas complète. Elle n’est pas complète car il manque une personne qui nous a soutenu depuis le début, nous et bien d’autres projets, et qui se doit de participer à cet événement ce soir. J’aimerais la remercier. J’appelle Eric Mahé à venir nous rejoindre à la tribune.

OpenOffice.org n’est pas juste un projet extraordinaire, porteur d’espoir pour le monde; en inspirant par la puissance de son exemple plutôt que par l’exemple de sa puissance, ce projet a créé la meilleure suite logicielle au monde. Meilleure, parce qu’elle est Libre, c’est à dire libre pour tous, et porteuse de liberté, par sa qualité et par son usage de formats ouverts et standards. Je pense bien sûr au format OpenDocument et au PDF. Bien sûr, certains veulent utiliser ce label de formats ouverts à leurs propres fins. C’est leur droit s’ils le souhaitent, ce sera leur chance s’ils y contribuent avec nous; l’invitation reste toujours d’actualité. Mais me direz-vous, qu’a-t’ on mis dans cette version 3.0 pour en dire autant de bien? La liste des nouveautés serait trop longue: je ne retiendrais que quelques points majeurs.

Une nouvelle architecture améliorant les performances et plaçant les extensions au coeur des usages d’OpenOffice.org, la capacité d’importer des documents PDF, de gérer et d’éditer des pages de wiki et de blogs directement depuis OpenOffice.org, la distribution commune avec le projet Mozilla du client mail Thunderbird et du calendrier Lightning; j’ai gardé le meilleur pour la fin: OpenOffice.org est désormais 100% native sur le Mac. OpenOffice.org 3.0 est disponible au téléchargement. Merci à tous, et bonne soirée!

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Writer Team Activities at OOoCon 2008

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:21:48 -0400

In two weeks our annual conference OOoCon is about to take place in Beijing. Time to point out some Writer Team related events to you.

A must-attend certainly is Oliver-Rainer Wittmann's presentation Writer 3.0 - What's new, what's going on on Friday which sums up the changes and enhancements made for OOo 3.0. Furthermore, Oliver-Rainer will show you some projects which are currently work in progress.

Another presentation that I would like to recommend is Making the New Notes - Community, Cooperation, Concepts given by gold medal winning Maximilian Odendahl, Christoph Noack and Christian Jansen. They will share the experiences made during the implementation of the new Notes feature with you.

Also on Friday, Svante Schubert will talk about The new ODF 1.2 Metadata Framework and its Support in OpenOffice.org 3, which surely will be very interesting both for Writer users and developers.

From a developer's point of view I'm looking forward to Cheng Jian Hong's presentation Visualize Writer Document Structure for Productive Development which will introduce a tool to inspect the Writer core structures. This sounds really promising.

I'm a little bit off my usual tracks when co-hosting the ODFDOM Workshop. We prepared some exercises that will help the participants to gain an understanding of the purpose and feature set of this new API.

If you like to get in contact with us, just approach us when you spot us roaming the halls of the conference venue or drop me an email if you like to schedule an appointment. I'm looking forward to meeting you in Beijing!

links for 2008-10-18

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 05:56:00 -0400

The Things He Carried
Rather over-the-top article about security theatre at US airports.
YouTube - Batman vs. The Penguin: The Debate
Seems someone's script writer is a Batman fan.
Microsoft: OpenOffice better than Google Apps
Seems OpenOffice.org has Microsoft's attention. I must say I think Ballmer misses the point of Google Docs here, which I use in addition to OO.o not instead of it. It's the ODF that makes the difference...
OpenOffice.org 3.0 Unofficial Builds Includes PPC
I've seen several people asking for PPC builds for the new OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac. This unofficial site contains builds by the community team responsible for the Mac port.
Announcing the AEGIS project - a €12.6m investment in open source accessibility
A major consortium of companies gets together to make accessibility for open source even more mainstream. They will focus on desktop, RIA and mobile applications. The work includes the people from Sun who made OpenOffice.org and then GNOME accessible.

links for 2008-10-17

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:38:00 -0400

First million!
A million downloads of OpenOffice.org in two days. No wonder the site is reeling in shock.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is an incremental improvement
Pretty good review. The article comments that the look & feel seems old. One reason for this is that retaining the familiarity of look and feel does away with the need for training for most existing users of document packages. As I heard at the ODF Workshop last week, that alone is driving adoption of OpenOffice.org
OO.o Move to Subversion done
Another step in the overall scheme to making it easier for developers to engage in the OpenOffice.org source code.
ODF workshop
Report on the event by the co-chair, Aslam Raffee. It's OK, Aslam, I was joking about the trademark :-)

Announcing the AEGIS project - a €12.6m investment in open source accessibility

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:27:44 -0400

Today I am more than pleased to share with you news of the AEGIS project, a €12.6m investment in accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused on open source solutions.

What is AEGIS?

AEGIS stands for "open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards". It is a major research and development investment in building accessibility into future mainstream Information & Communication Technologies.

AEGIS was made possible in large part by the European Commission through a grant under the Seventh Framework Programme funding for Research on eInclusion, in service of the ICT for Inclusion Unit of the Information Society and Media Directorate-General. In addition to the European grant contribution of €8.22m from FP7-ICT-2007-2, matching funds from AEGIS consortium members provide the balance of the €12.6m research and development investment.

Who is AEGIS?

The AEGIS project is made up of a consortium of 20 partners spanning 10 countries. They are drawn from industry (both large & small), disability organizations, and university & commercial research organizations; and they represent much of the leading expertise in accessibility from those sectors. The AEGIS consortium is:

In addition to these main participants, several partners are involving multiple of their departments/branches. At the Center for Research & Technology Hellas, both the Hellenic Institute of Transport and the Informations and Telematics Institute are taking part. At Sun, we are involving our engineering sites in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Ireland in Europe; as well as China and the United States.

When is AEGIS?

AEGIS is a 42 month project that just got underway with a kickoff meeting in Prague last month (posting pictures is on my to-do list...). Right now we are focused on refining our three and a half year plans, planning the initial user studies and requirements gathering, and working on our immediate deliverables (like getting the website up!).

What does AEGIS do?

The AEGIS project objectives are to take the early successes of API-based accessibility solutions (also known as "programmatic" or "engineered" accessibility), and expand upon them in three key areas:

#1 - AEGIS on the desktop

On the open desktop, AEGIS expands upon the existing, good work of the GNOME Accessibility Project, and the OpenOffice.org Accessibility Project. Key focus areas for the desktop include:

magnification improvements (and an open source framework for future magnification-based assistive technologies)
ensuring that there is good open source text-to-speech for all European languages
ensuring that that OpenOffice.org is an excellent place for authoring accessible content (and that people with severe cognitive impairments are able to communicate in written form with it)
building a robust accessibility testing framework for distributed open source accessibility development
developing & integrating real-time-text solutions for the deaf into existing open source audio/video chat software
developing open source eye-tracking solutions based on commodity web-cam hardware

#2 - AEGIS work on rich Internet applications ("Web 2.0")

For the web, AEGIS takes the programmatic accessibility ideas already proven in the open desktop, and brings them to the Web 2.0 world of rich Internet applications. Programmatic accessibility is significantly more complex in the web world - even more so with the rich visual interfaces enabled by technologies like AJAX and DHTML and Flash and JavaFX Script.

Instead of the typical three components of the desktop that have to work together - the application (component #1) which exposes accessibility API information as defined by the desktop/operating system (component #2) to assistive technologies (component #3) in order to achieve accessibility - you now have the fourth component of the web browser/web user agent, which sits between the application and the desktop/operating system.

Not only does this web user agent have to convey all of the rich programmatic/API information back and forth between the application and the assistive technology, it also has to play the role of translator - taking some canonical "web accessibility API" and expressing it potentially differently on each operating system it is running on.

In addition to these significant challenges, there is a multiplicity of technologies for creating and deploying rich Internet applications (such as those mentioned above - AJAX, JavaFX Script, etc. - and many others). Emerging specifications from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative - the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) - are critical, but aren't by themselves a complete solution.

Web browsers must support these standards, and translate them to the appropriate accessibility interfaces of the underlying operating system, and from there on to assistive technologies. But since web applications are commonly built with user interface component sets, it is critical to build support for these accessibility APIs and standards into those components, so applications built with them don't have to re-implement that support each time.

And to finish the job, developer tools used to create these rich Internet applications should explicitly aid developers in utilizing the accessibility APIs and standards provided by those component sets. And of course, the highly dynamic and visual user interfaces that we see in things like Flash and JavaFX use there own runtimes/user agents, where WAI-ARIA isn't as good a fit.

The AEGIS research and development work for rich Internet applications will be addressing all of these challenges, and doing so for a variety of user agents and user interface component sets on a variety of operating systems. And to the greatest extent possible, doing so utilizing open source technologies.

#3 - AEGIS research into mobile device accessibility

For the past few years, mobile devices have grown in capability and complexity and power such that they now rival yesterday's desktop computers. Yet while most of the desktop computing work is moving to (or in the case of the open source UNIX and GNU/Linux desktop have already moved to) API-based accessibility, what solutions exist for the mobile world today are still stuck in the previous generation approach to accessibility. What assistive technologies exist for mobile are bolt-on, reverse-engineered, and ultimately unsatisfying solutions with limited ability to work with downloaded/3rd party applications - the very place where mobile device capabilities are most rapidly expanding.

In AEGIS we will apply the same proven concepts and approaches of the open desktop to develop research prototypes for accessible mobile devices. Specifically we will work on accessibility frameworks and APIs, user interface component sets, developer tools, and sample applications to enable assistive technologies to work in a supported framework on mobile devices - without the need to reverse-engineer applications.

AEGIS' focus on economic disparities

In the United States where I live, people with disabilities endure a 70% unemployment rate. A 2004 labour market report for Europe notes an average 60% unemployment rate among the blind in Europe - with countries such as Hungary rising to 77% rate. As we move from the West to the Majority World, we starting running into situations such as I commented on recently in Afghanistan, and which Jim Fruchterman so eloquently discusses regularly in his blog. As difficult as it is for unemployed people with disabilities to obtain expensive, reverse-engineered assistive technologies in the West, in much of the rest of the world that isn't even a distant possibility.

We believe that we can dramatically reduce the cost of accessible technology by doing three key things:

shifting from reverse-engineered and bolted on solutions to built-in and supported architectures for accessibility
making the cost of building accessible technology - in developers' time and expense - as close to zero as possible
building a large collection of open source solutions that can be directly used throughout the world with zero licensing or royalty charge

AEGIS' focus on open source

Open source is at the heart of AEGIS. It is the engine that pumps the blood into realizing the widest possible dissemination of the results of AEGIS' research, to enable the broadest possible adoption of AEGIS' techniques and solutions. While not everything done by consortium members under AEGIS will carry an open source license, the vast majority will.

To the greatest extent possible AEGIS work will build on top of existing open source environments and applications and tools and user interface libraries and assistive technologies. This is particularly true of AEGIS' work on the open desktop, but also in AEGIS' work on rich Internet applications.

By leveraging popular (and cross-platform) open source applications like OpenOffice.org and Firefox we enable large numbers of end users to benefit from our research and development work (and to do so on multiple desktop operating systems).

Likewise by leveraging popular open source developer tools like NetBeans, we enable large numbers of developers to utilize tools for creating accessible applications. And even when the open source technologies aren't part of wildly popular applications that have been downloaded more than 500 million times and are approaching 20% market share, the very fact that so much of AEGIS research and prototypes will be released under open source licenses means that others can incorporate them royalty-free.

And it greatly increases the chances that people with disabilities can get those results at little to no cost. Which bring us to...

AEGIS' focus on people with disabilities

If open source is the heart of AEGIS, then people with disabilities must be its soul. Everything we do in AEGIS starts with them. Some of the strongest disability organizations in Europe are part of AEGIS. Their contributions begin with requirements gathering, continue through their working in partnership with the research & industrial members by participating in development of specifications, and concludes with their critical role in user trials.

It is people with disabilities who have the most to gain from AEGIS research results - and the most to loose if we don't get it right. Technology - so full of promise and potential to help - is at the same time so very capable of leaving them behind. Every second that passes, 4 people are born into this world. In that same second, 36 mobile devices are activated, and 411 web pages are created. Globally we are on track to purchase 1.3 billion mobile devices in 2008. Create 12.8 billion new web pages. Google already indexes 1 trillion web pages! If we don't take care to build accessibility into these now, we run the grave risk of leaving far too many people behind.

AEGIS' focus on developer

It is precisely because of the staggering numbers in the paragraph above that we must also focus on the developer. The easier it is for a developer to create an accessible application or website or mobile device, the more likely it is that she will do so. The cheaper we make it - both in terms of the cost of the tools as well as the cost of developer's time - the more likely we'll see accessible results.

This is why, in addition to having the disability community help us set our requirements and provide input to our specifications and feedback in trials of our prototypes, we will have developers playing exactly those same roles with respect to the developer tools and user interface component sets and accessibility frameworks. Developers from AEGIS consortium industrial partners, and drawn from the computer science departments of University partners, as well as those who join our work in the open source community, will play a vital role in helping us make the process of building accessibility easy and inexpensive.

Sun's role(s) in AEGIS

Sun plays a number of critical roles in the AEGIS project. Sun - in the person of yours truly (and too many long nights) - wrote the bulk of the AEGIS grant proposal. And Sun - again in the person of yours truly - is the Technical Manager of the AEGIS project. But it is other qualities and attributes of Sun Microsystems that will play the biggest role in AEGIS as we carry out this very major undertaking:

#1 - Sun brought the API-based approach to the market

Sun has been the first and most consistent champion of programmatic & built-in accessibility approaches:

1997 with the Java Accessibility API
2000 with StarOffice and OpenOffice.org accessibility
leadership in the GNOME community as maintainers of the GNOME accessibility framework
work in the web community as maintainers of the UNIX portion of the Mozilla accessibility project,
work on an incredibly powerful and flexible open source screen reader/magnifier

#2 - Sun is the single biggest contributor to open source

According to the UNU-MERIT study in 2006, Sun Microsystems is the single biggest contributor of free and open source software in the world - both by lines of code and by person-months of contribution and by value. Number 2 by ranking isn't even close. In fact, according to this study Sun's contributions are greater than those of thee next 7 largest contributors combined! And with our recent acquisitions of MySQL and Innotek, you'd have to combine the next 10 contributors contributions to exceed Sun's. Since open source is at the heart of so much of AEGIS - including both those places where we have spearheaded much of the existing open source accessibility work and in the less accessible domains of rich Internet applications and mobile devices - Sun's incredible knowledge and expertise an standing within these communities will be critical to AEGIS' open source accessibility success.

#3 - Sun is tied into accessibility standards and regulatory efforts

As we move into a future of converged devices (cell phones that are web browsers and handle our e-mail, Blu-ray movies that include video games and get supplemented with new content all playing on the TV in your living room, and of course the desktop software you can use to make phone calls), there is an increasing push for accessibility regulations that cover these and future emerging technologies. As we move away from software built using a small number of platform-defined programming interfaces of Windows & Macintosh & UNIX, to the "wild west" of anything goes so long as it can send pixels over a the Internet to your screen, there is an obvious need for standards to help define how to make those interfaces accessible.

Sun played a very significant role in the U.S. Section 508 regulatory process which is the framework for technology accessibility in America:

sat on the original Electronic and Information Technology Access Advisory Committee that led to the existing Section 508 accessibility standards
subcommittee co-chair of the Technology and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee
main editor of the final report of that committee to the U.S. Access Board to help it in it's refresh of Section 508 and Section 255 accessibility standards
instrumental in several of the User Interface and Electronic Content recommendations relating directly to the approach we are taking in AEGIS - those that are in support of programmatic accessibility approaches.

In the standards arena, Sun is a deep and passionate believer in and promoter of open standards that are free to all to implement:

long-time member of the World Wide Web Consortium
founding member of the Open Accessibility group which is creating open accessibility standards
brought the XML file formats of OpenOffice.org to the OASIS XML-focused open standards body leading to the now ISO Standard ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (better known as OpenDocument format)
co-chair of the OASIS OpenDocument Accessibility subcommittee - the first of its kind organization focused on document accessibility standards (and which I proudly note is open to all with even the usual membership fees waived for the disability organizations that participate)

In conclusion...

To close this rather long post, I want to thank the European Commission e-Inclusion unit and my fellow consortium members. With AEGIS we are embarking on a very ambitious and challenging research and development program. I believe it will ultimately be an incredibly satisfying one.

OpenOffice.org and archiving

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:01:45 -0400

At the ODF Workshop last week, a number of the delegates were asking about the right way to handle archiving of their documents. Obviously ODF offers a baseline file format that promises long-term readability and editability, but the question remains of how best to handle files. With the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0, there are now two alternatives, and we heard at the conference of a third alternative coming in the future from ODF.

ODF plus PDF
Most of the archivists I have spoken to have insisted that one should always keep the original document in its original format, regardless of other choices. The easiest option for archiving is to retain the original file, with an optional copy filtered to ODF if the original is not in ODF, and then accompany the file with a PDF image. Technology exists to automatically create all this.
PDF Container
OpenOffice.org includes extensive new PDF handling features, including PDF/A support, access to PDF's distribution and use controls and the ability to include the original ODF in a "container" inside a "hybrid PDF". This last feature offers a fine archiving alternative, where a single file is created but within it the original ODF is retained for future use.
Read-Only ODF
At the workshop, we heard from Jomar Silva on the future of ODF 1.2. One of the features he described was signed, read-only ODF, allowing the preservation of the document exactly as used (it's on slide 4).

Choosing which to use is obviously a decision for each archiving authority, but the richness of the new PDF support means that the options open to arhcivists just grew enormously.

Numbers about OOo 3.0 release

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:18:12 -0400

At the 8^th birthday of OpenOffice.org the release of OOo 3.0 is done. It was hard work for all teams especially at the end of this Major Release. In the release notes you can find what's new and cool in this major update. Thanks for all of you, who are working so hard to make this release possible today.

For all of you, who wants to have a deeper look into the release here are the statistics of OOo 3.0.

General numbers :

In ~590 CWSs more than ~2850 issues were fixed and integrated into the code line for OOo 3.0. These are the numbers for OOo 3.0 code line only. In between there were also the last fixes for OOo 2.4 and all issues from OOo 2.4.1 integrated. This leads to more than 3100 issues are in since the split of OOo 2.x and OOo 3.0 (DEV300m...) code lines. That's a mass and nearly double the numbers for the last feature release OOo 2.4.

CWS numbers :

As you can see in the graphs most of the CWS were integrated after Feature Freeze and also after Beta 1. This time was needed to polish the features, fix the critical bugs which were reported by beta testers and to clean up the install sets and setup to be as save as possible after the split to the 3 Layer Office.
77% of all CWS went through the full approval process of the Sun QA. 12% were approved by Release Engineering team, 5% by the Sun Development team and the contribution from the OOo community was round about at 6%.

The distribution on issues and user groups are a little bit different. 85% of the registered issues at a CWS were approved by Sun QA team, 7% by Sun RE team, 3% by Sun DEV team and 5% by the OOo community contribution.

Issue numbers / types :

Round about 350 issues marked as features or enhancements were integrated for OOo 3.0 until Feature Freeze. Some of them were late, some came too late and some had to be integrated after Beta 2. Which components got most of it, can be seen in the next graph.

More than 1700 issues which are marked as bugs were fixed.

Exactly 300 issues which marked as patch (most code contribution by community members) were fixed and integrated also in OOo 3.0.

The rest of 240 issues are marked as tasks. (This is a very critical mass! Nobody knows why some developers mark features/enhancements and bug fixes as this type of issue.)

These are nearly 2600 issues which are tracked in the IssueTracker on OOo. The rest are Sun internal issue like stacktrace issues (issues generated from the crash reports by OOo users).

Summary :

With OOo 3.0 the native Aqua platform for MAC was introduced. This leads to a high number of features and issues in GSL (General System Layer) project. The general feedback for the MAC platform on OOo is very positive. There are some general issues still open to get the same quality as on the other platforms. But as many users reported it's the best version they ever had on MAC.

OOo 3.0 was a Major Release and in it many general restructuring and refactoring was started. Also from now on the default file format is based on ODF 1.2 (the standard will be approved soon) instead of ODF 1.1 in OOo 2.x. All these changes could be done in a major step only, because of possible incompatibilities to the the 2.x code line.

This major release was a challenge for all release driver on OOo. Also the OOo teams for QA and L10N had many new things to organize, which didn't exists on OOo 2.x code line or wasn't a problem for that updates. Thanks to all the teams for their hard work.

In general the quality of OOo 3.0 is very high. In comparison with OOo 2.0 final this version is much much better. But there are still some issues open and I think there will come up more critical issues since today, when OOo 3.0 will be used in general work flow on many systems. These issues will be addressed in OOo 3.0.1, which should came out end of November/begin of December '08.

Give OOo 3.0 a try. As I see many users do it now. The side seems to be down by the high download rate. So stay tuned and download the version for your daily work soon!

Pretoria ODF Users Workshop

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:55:29 -0400

I’m a bit tardy in reporting what happened last week at the Second International ODF Users Conference, held in Pretoria, South Africa. This was the first time I was ever in Africa, much less South Africa, and so I was very much looking forward to the trip. It did not disappoint. What always strikes me at [...]

ODF @ OOoCon 2008

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:21:00 -0400

Ah,the relief. I can miss the silly season this year. I can turn off the TV, turn off the talk radio, turn the newspaper straight to the sports page, and altogether ignore the last month of the campaign.

Why? Because I'm attending the OpenOffice.org 2008 Conference in Beijing, November 5th-7th. Since I'll miss election day, I'm submitting an absentee ballot, and in fact I've just filled it out. I predict a great increase in personal productivity from being able to sit out the remainder of the minute-by-minute saturation campaign coverage.

This will be my third OOoCon. After Barcelona last year and Lyon in 2006, the organizers this year have a tough act to follow. But from what I can see, this year is shaping up to be the "best ever", with open ceremonies at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse (former residence of Madame Mao) and a conference sessions at Peking University.

Although the focus of the conference is OpenOffice.org, the program, the developers, the translators, promoters and users, there is also a natural overlapping interest in OpenDocument Format (ODF). Because of this, OOoCon typically is also the largest ODF conference of the year, at least based on number of ODF-related sessions.

In particular I'll draw your attention to the following ODF-related sessions:

Interoperability -- expectations, promises, problems and solutions (Florian Reuter)
OpenOffice.org and the ODF Ecosystem (Dieter Loeschky)
Panel Discussion -- ODF Interoperability Perspectives (with representatives from IBM, Sun, Google, Novell, FEDICT, moderated by Aslam Rafee of DST)
ODF@WWW -- An ODF Wiki (Kay Ramme)
OOo and ODF Accessibility (Malte Timermann)
The New ODF 1.2 Metadata Framework and its Support in OpenOffice.org 3 (Svante Schubert)
ODFDOM -the new open sourced multi-tiered API for ISO OpenDocument Format (Svante Schubert)
ODF Accessibility: Perspectives Past & Future (Don Harbison)
Introduction to SMIL and Implementation in Lotus Symphony (Yan Peng Guo /IBM)
Transforming and OWL Ontology to an OpenOffice Document Template (Massoud Toussi)
Improving ODF Applications by sharing ODF tests (Svante Schubert)
Enabling ODF for Social Collaboration with Composite Applications and Mashups (Santosh Kumar)
ODFDOM Workshop -- using the new opensourced multi-tiered API for ODF (Svante Schubert)
Digital Signatures: A Global Challenge (Joachim Linger)

Full details are in the conference program. My pride in seeing so many good ODF-related sessions is slightly offset by the the sadness that interest in ODF has grown so much that I can not possibly attend all of these sessions.

I hope to see many old and new friends in Beijing. This is a great opportunity to continue spreading the message of open source and open standards around the globe.

Daily Links 10/11/2008 (p.m.)

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:30:06 -0400

ODF Going Global [on Simon Phipps, SunMink] “Marino Marcich of the ODF Alliance pointed out that there are now organisations from 62 countries represented in his membership, and I’m left with the strong of impression of a growing global community of practice in governments of every kind, both politically and geographically. From small roots ODF has [...]

ODF Going Global

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:16:00 -0400

If you've been wondering where I have got to (go on, humour me), the answer is I am miles from home in South Africa where I came on Tuesday to participate in the second International ODF Workshop. The South African government were perfect, gracious and attentive hosts, personified in conference co-chair Aslam Raffee, and the attendees were from a wide range of countries.

Content highlights for me were hearing from the Belgian and Brazilian delegations on their progress with adopting ODF as a standard; the infectious enthusiasm of Justice Singh from the high court in Allahabad, India speaking of how and why his court is embracing ODF; practical, sensible questions from so many people; and the announcement from the Venezuelan delegation of their decision to adopt ODF.

The event also encouraged me to think about the words that will shape the global ODF adoption community going forward. My presentation, Seven Words, traced a little of the history of both ODF and the Free and open source software communities that created it. It went on to consider adoption philosophies and practicalities, including a sketch of a migration plan I created by consolidating the various stories I heard from adopters on the first day.

Marino Marcich of the ODF Alliance pointed out that there are now organisations from 62 countries represented in his membership, and I'm left with the strong of impression of a growing global community of practice in governments of every kind, both politically and geographically. From small roots ODF has grown to both a global movement and a strong technology, spreading wherever fair-minded people are willing to take a stand. It's been worth the trip.

Blogs | Open Document - Online Community for the OpenDocument OASIS Standard

Working on Calc Performance Bottlenecks

We now use a CMS and so can you…

Some Calc features for 3.1 from RedFlag 2000

Daily Links 11/14/2008 (p.m.)

ODF@WWW - OOo Conf 2008

So you thought OpenOffice.org controlled ODF? Think again…

Slideshare

Daily Links 11/06/2008 (p.m.)

odftoolkit.org launched

ODF Toolkit Union

Daily Links 11/03/2008 (p.m.)

ODF Update

Links for the end of October

New in 3.0: xslt based filters as extensions

The Speech

Writer Team Activities at OOoCon 2008

links for 2008-10-18

links for 2008-10-17

Announcing the AEGIS project - a €12.6m investment in open source accessibility

What is AEGIS?

Who is AEGIS?

When is AEGIS?

What does AEGIS do?

#1 - AEGIS on the desktop

#2 - AEGIS work on rich Internet applications ("Web 2.0")

#3 - AEGIS research into mobile device accessibility

AEGIS' focus on economic disparities

AEGIS' focus on open source

AEGIS' focus on people with disabilities

AEGIS' focus on developer

Sun's role(s) in AEGIS

#1 - Sun brought the API-based approach to the market

#2 - Sun is the single biggest contributor to open source

#3 - Sun is tied into accessibility standards and regulatory efforts

In conclusion...

OpenOffice.org and archiving

ODF plus PDF

PDF Container

Read-Only ODF

Numbers about OOo 3.0 release

General numbers :

CWS numbers :

Issue numbers / types :

Summary :

Pretoria ODF Users Workshop

ODF @ OOoCon 2008

Daily Links 10/11/2008 (p.m.)

ODF Going Global