OpenOffice.org was awarded the SOHO AWARDS 2008 yesterday. Congratulations to this effort!

Attending the 6th OpenOffice.org conference is a special experience. This when I compare it with the three previous conferences I attended.

For the first time in the history of the open source project, the conference is held in a non European country. In this way, the project shows its world wide strength. Emphasize this strength, is something that can be trusted to be done the Chinese speakers. At least 8 representatives from (semi-) governmental organizations, IT-industry and education did so: "open source is important for the own industry and people". OpenOffice.org is closed into the hearts and the project fully supported.

Also, the use of open source software helps fighting software piracy. This was underlined by Prof. Ni Guangnan from one of the universities. The light tintling is his eyes revealed that he understands quite well, that this is not the kind of 'fighting' Microsoft has in mind...

As for my personal opinion, also has to be mentioned that every Chinese speaker emphasized the importance of protecting the environment and the desired role of ICT in this field. More directly related to the OpenOffice.org project, was the speech from Hu Caiyong, general manager from Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Technology Co. Ltd., short: Redflag 2000. Their product RedOffice knows a large adoption by national, regional and locale governments. With Redflag 2000 more than two hundred people work on RedOffice, which is based on OpenOffice.org. Last year Redflag 2000 and Sun Microsystems, the founder of the OpenOffice.org-project, signed an arrangement and from then on the cooperation intensifies, and people from Beijing and Hamburg work more together on areas as quality (QA) and development.

But let me stick to China for another moment. Beijing also is the location for the few hundred people counting IBM team that works on Symphony, the OpenOffice.org 1-based product in the Lotus-family. Symphony's version 1.2 has just been released and Michael Karasick, manager of the Symphony team, showed their road-map for integration of their work in the main OpenOffice.org 3 code line.

So there I sit, as representative of a small European country, looking at the impressive Asian presence. Louis Suarez-Potts, OOo-community manager, added a bit with the example of a Indian region, of which he found out recently that more than a million children at primary schools use OpenOffice.org. It is been distributed there on CD-ROM by the government. It is available in many Indian languages. The Malaysian government, to mentions something else, saved 9.5 million dollar in the last year, just by making the choice for the right office suite.
Here in the Netherlands all and everyone seems addicted to Microsoft products. Success stories do exist, but only after years the migrations really are starting up. Market in The Netherlands is much tougher that in Asia.

The contribution of Michael Bemmer, general manager at Sun Hamburg, however gave me more faith. The Sun developers work with a clear vision on the future of office productivity. Apart from the already existing possibilities for collaboration and document management, integrating with OpenOffice.org, work is continuing for easier integration with much more software, will the suite be modularised, are tool for web-document integration on their way, is the function for Extensions enhanced. etcetera. And this all for a program that already enables seamless working amongst different platforms, which can be extended by using a variety of scripting and programming languages, supports more that a hundred languages for end users, has more than 8 years history, delivers a quality release 4 times a year, … And that all apart from the independent document standard ODF, which is widely supported.

After the applause for the opening ceremony, I merge in the crowd counting more than four hundred attendants. That also is more than last years. And I meet friends and people I know from France, Italy, Spain, Germany, America, Japan, China, Indonesia, Sweden, … With them, I start coping the program, which with four parallel sessions gives many hard choices to make. And without any doubt, our Chines hosts will make sure that we get everything else we need, and more.

Now it is Sunday evening. And looking back, I can give not only credits to them, but also to the those who presented at the conference. People from Sun, RedFlag 2000, Novell, IBM, people from the various countries and projects, and independent developers working with the people from Sun, all did a tremendous job with interesting talks, that much can be learnt from. It was good to see the quality with which some Chinese speakers were able to do their presentation. Not all of them of course – it is obvious that English is quite difficult for some. On the other hand, in my opinion also the presenting skills from some of our western European friends can easily be improved; something to keep in mind. Finally, after three days of conferencing, a wonderful closing diner, with great artists to entertain us, there were two days of tours. Seen lots of beautiful things. Of course a bit in a rush, so not surprisingly our guide concluded that we should come again, and than not for work but on only for enjoying the country and the people. Which is a good suggestion. People are friendly, youth is sparking, much to enjoy.

Thanks to all who made this happen and many greeting from our Chinese friends,
Cor

Cor Nouws is active member of the Dutch/Flanders OpenOffice.org-community and also serves on the OpenOffice.org-Community Council. He is founder and director of a Dutch supplier of training/consultancy for OpenOffice.org.

For a presentation at OOoCon in Beijing, Zaheda Bhorat collects stories about the OpenOffice.org community. Tell her your story!

Try out yourself: http://www.google.com/search?q=office

On October 13th, a great launch party took place in Paris, celebrating the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 and the eight birthday of the project. Congratulations to everyone involved!

My colleague Italo Vignoli has some great ideas on how to celebrate the launch of OOo 3.0 - and why.

Finally, OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been released! Get your download from www.openoffice.org
Congratulations to everyone involved in this release! It is a fantastic and important milestone for us.

You now can try out OpenOffice.org online. DT Netsolution offers a remote instance, based on the Sun Secure Global desktop. Try it out for yourself and see how great OpenOffice.org is. ;-)

Today, the Release Candidate 4 is available. If all goes well, this is the last RC before 3.0 comes out.

OpenOffice.org is the Golden Acorn Award winner for the month of October, awarded by FreeFunFiles.com!

My colleague Kay Koll found this interesting study: "The open source productivity suite OpenOffice has been found on 45% of the Linux and Windows machines scanned for the ongoing survey. However, deployment of OpenOffice (73%) is much greater among participants' personal computers than in the businesses where they work", acknowledged Kim Weins, OpenLogic's VP of sales and marketing, in an interview with BetaNews.

Information Week published an article about the same study.

The study itself is also available.

OpenOffice.org, the Region Ile de France, Silicon Sentier and Sun Microsystems invite you to celebrate the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 and the 8th Anniversary of the OOo Project. A party will take place on the 13th of October in Paris, France, at the Region Ile de France's Main Hall.

More information and registration link here: http://fr.openoffice.org/launch3

Today, OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC3 is available. If all goes well, this will be the final RC before the planned product release, so stay tuned!

Yesterday, OpenOffice.org received a Lutèce d'Or! This award was given to Charles Schulz from OpenOffice.org by the Minister Eric Besson (in charge with prospective, public policies and digital economy development). Congratulations to the French native-lang project for their great efforts and achievements!

Now it can't be long until OOo 3.0 is available. Today, the release candidate 2 was made available!

Many people have been asking when OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be available, and what the reasons for the delay are.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a major release with lots of changes not only in the visible part of the program, but also in the code. Projects of this size require lots of testing, especially in the last phase of the release. Our beta versions and release candidates have been downloaded by tens of thousands of interested people which have given us great feedback that will be incorporated.

We expect to have OpenOffice.org 3.0 to be available at approximately the end of September, with a second release candidate being available in the next few days. We want to make OpenOffice.org 3.0 the best office suite ever, and we're confident that everyone will be excited with what we call "the year of 3"!

Open Source is not only a model of licensing and a model of software development, but it also is about enabling people from all over the world to take part in todays information society, no matter what their financial situation is. So, eventually, open source is also about humanity. Out of this reason, I'd like to introduce to our fellow blog readers a service that also works on a charitable basis: aGoodCause.com

aGoodCause is a partnership between 700 of the world's most important NGOs - charities like Save the Children, Red Cross, Amnesty International, OXFAM and many others. Their idea is to support animal welfare, human rights, fighting poverty and climate protection. They do this by enabling online shoppers all over the world to support their favourite charity, when they shop online. Read more on their website!

The release candidate 1 of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now ready for testing. This test release is made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production use at this stage. If you are a regular user of OpenOffice.org, here's a great opportunity to help us make the next release the best ever. Download this release from our download page.

My colleague Alexandro Colorado writes: The site from the Ranger police have the statement of OpenOffice.org right on their homepage althought in Spanish, they state the succesful migration and adoption of modern technology with the goal of make their processes more efficient. Site: http://www.policiacaminera.gov.py

Registration for the Native-Lang Confederation meeting in preparation of OOoCon 2008 is now open!