Thursday, 19 Nov 2009
Thursday, 19 Nov 2009
As Christoph Noack opened a time capsule, let me do the same. Mine goes back 2 months to Sept 17/18/19 when specially invited members of the German-language OpenOffice.org community came to Hamburg. The visitors pictured above, plus me and Marcus Lange from Sun who joined the photo, were (l to r): Marcus Lange, Florian Effenberger, Daniel Stoni, Christian Lohmaier, Elizabeth Matthis (aka Liz), Thomas Hackert Uwe Altmann (not pictured: Gerald Geib, Volker Merschmann)
It was so wonderful to meet face to face people otherwise only known
from email and to be able to thank them for their dedication and
support. They each traveled here at their own cost (from far corners of
Germany and even from Switzerland), which further shows their enthusiasm
and dedication to our thriving open source product. On Thursday evening,
those who were already in Hamburg met at a pub (Max&Consorten) for a first get-together. Afterward,
most of us concluded the evening with a round of beers and more talk at
my home---which I jokingly called "Motel Matthis".
Friday started out with a heartfelt word of welcome and thanks from
Michael Bemmer, Senior Director of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Engineering, and
unfolded with a series of talks and snacks, including lunch and several
smaller group meetings about special topics, until concluding at
approximately 5:30 PM.
There were entertaining and informative talks by Stefan Taxhet on OOo in
general, Gerd Weiss on infrastructure---including a personal tour of the
server rooms to underline some of his points about the hardware, Andreas
Bartel on Renaissance and Uwe Fischer on documentation, as well as tours
of the engineering facility and opportunities to say hello to many of
the OOo developers in real life.

At the end of the very busy but fun day, those of us who still had time
went out to eat together at an Italian restaurant (maybe this
was to get in the mood for the OOoCon in Italy!) and, several courageous
visitors even spent a second night at Motel Matthis! This time Uwe made
sure we had enough beer to let us talk long into the night. Thanks, Uwe!

Some comments I received after the visit are:
thackert: "It was interesting to become acquainted with some people I'd
only known the mail address or nick of, and to hear really interesting
talks as well to "sightsee" SUN. All in all a nice trip and - the best
of all - a really nice stay at "Motel Matthis" with a perfect hostess
(Liz!)"
floeff: "Thank you very much to everyone who made this visit in Hamburg
possible! I'd never been at Sun Hamburg before, and it was a really nice
day meeting old and new friends, getting insight on how the
OpenOffice.org development works, and after all, we also had a lot of
fun and a real great time. Liz is a wonderful hostess and we all enjoyed
some very special days in a community that more and more becomes a real
family."
VolkerMe: "Thank you again for such a nice day, which was very much too
short for me. The opportunity to have personal talks with the engineers
at SUN was so interesting, I wasn't able to discuss everything, so I
hope I can come back another time. And although it has been said so
often: Thanks Liz for hosting the meeting, for the well-prepared
accommodation and for being our always smiling guide!
Saturday came too quickly and I had to say goodbye to my delightful
guests. I hope to organize another visit to thank additional and
like-wise dedicated community members in 2010.
Kind regards,
Liz
tags: community user-experience
Thursday, 12 Nov 2009
3 seats on the OpenOffice.org Community Council are to be taken by community members to represent their constituency. After the nomination and introduction period now the 3 elections are open.
Code Contributor Representative: candidate Jürgen Schmidt seeks the support of code contributors.
Product Development Representative: candidates Christoph Noack and Alexandro Colorado strive for the majority of votes from leads of accepted projects and incubator projects.
Native Language Representative: candidate Charles-H. Schulz seeks the support of leads of native language projects.
If you are a member of one of the above mentioned constituencies you will have received an email that invites you to participate. Please cast your vote until November 16.
It looks a bit complicated but there are descriptions available about the OpenOffice.org Community Council, its charter, the election process and the candidates for the November 2009 elections.
Thanks go to the helping hands running the elections as commissary (Louis, louis@ooo) and observers (Mechtilde, mechtilde@ooo; Sophie, sgauti@ooo).
PS: If you think you should have received an invitation please drop me, the commissary and observers a note (after a look in your spam folder ;-).
tags: community council openoffice.org
Wednesday, 28 Oct 2009
a follow up to blog: OOo QA Internship programm
I am proud to introduce the results from the three month individual project of the Hitek school students, which is an important and closing part inside the oo qa internship program: Sample Music Database
p.s. a lot of further info & stuff you get on the students sites
screenshots from a students sample database:

.. at the end i would like to quote Nadejda, a student from the project:
"I'd like to say THANK YOU, OOo Openoffice for this project! Thank you for opportunity to learn so many new things! The time of internship was a great time! Sometimes it was very hard but I enjoyed it. I will miss you. Good luck OOo Openoffice!"
bye Chris
tags: community ooo open open-source openoffice.org opensource qa quality software sun
Friday, 09 Oct 2009
It's time to continue my little overview about the community work in the framework project. Today I want to enlighten the work on a new feature. Thanks to our volunteer Robert Zhou from CS2C we can start to implement it, which is currently targeted for OpenOffice.org 3.3. This feature is called:
The motivation for this feature is to enhance the speed of searching text and to avoid a dialog window hiding the content of the document.
The goal for OpenOffice.org 3.3 is to provide a tool bar which will provide quick text searching without hiding document content. It shall include forward and backwards searching, search for all occurrences, case and whole word matching.
Below you can see the current mock up from the current search toolbar specification (late draft).
Due to the fact that we have a volunteer who is not very familiar with the all OpenOffice.org projects which are needed to implement this task, the feature set is limited. I don't think that this is a drawback as otherwise this interesting feature won't be included in OpenOffice.org soon. The feature should be available for Writer only.
Please keep in mind: There is no chance to ask for enhancements on the first run. The most important goal is to get this feature done. Enhancements and new features can be added if there is time and the volunteer is willing to continue his work.
Thanks to Jaron Kuppers, Robert Zhou, Stefan Baltzer, Zhu Lihua and Li Meiying who worked on the specification. The complete specification can be found on the OpenOffice.org wiki server:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Specification_search_toolbar
If you interested to help us we are looking for volunteers for QA, user experience and developers. There is no need to be an experienced open source volunteer. You can start with easy tasks and get familiar as time goes by. Therefore everybody who wants to join the OpenOffice.org community can provide valuable input. This is your chance to actively influence the progress of OpenOffice.org.
You can contact me via e-mail or subscribe to the framework development mailing list. Everybody is welcome. The framework team will help you to have an easy start.
tags: community framework openoffice.org
Thursday, 20 Aug 2009
Today I want to start a little overview about the current work of the framework project community members. Fortunately we have some volunteers from RedFlag 2000 who work on several projects. This time I want to provide some information about the following enhancement:
If you often change the user interface of OpenOffice.org you will probably stumble over the effect that the current user interface migration is not very smart. The migration process just copies all customized user interface settings from the old to the new version. This can result that you won't see any additional menu or toolbar items included in a new version. It's clear that only a minority customize the user interface of OpenOffice.org. But this problem leads to a bad user experience for all people who like to do it. Wu Yan, a developer from RedFlag 2000, and myself talked about the root cause and how to solve it in an acceptable way. Now that a first prototype is ready I want to give you a brief overview about the features.
The user interface migration enhancement wants to provide users the ability to choose what changes are migrated into a new version. Normal users can use the default which migrates all customized changes to a new version.
You can see a screenshot of a first prototype below:
First prototype: User interface of the UI migration wizard
You can see the Writer menu differences between a customized OpenOffice.org 2.3 and 3.2 (DEV300m55). The user can delete changes or reset his/her work. „OK“ migrates the remaning entries and with „Cancel the user can abort the migration process. This user interface is just a prototype to test the implementation and have a first impression.
Attention:
If you interested in this enhancement
and know how to write a specification. We are looking for volunteers
who want to help us writing a good specification for this
enhancement. Most developers are not good at creating a compelling
user interface which can be used by normal users. Therefore people
who want to join the OpenOffice.org community can provide valuable
input. This is your chance to actively influence the progress of
OpenOffice.org and work on an interesting enhancement.
You can contact
me via e-mail or subscribe to the framework
development mailing list. Everybody is welcome. The framework team will help you to have an easy start.
tags: community framework openoffice.org
Tuesday, 07 Jul 2009
a follow up to blog: About one year of OOo QA Reloaded
The QA Reloaded Project and the general Mentoring and Participation Concept covers a lot of possibilities to connect and synchronize the OOo QA community with the SUN QA to optimize the quality of the OOo QA productivity suite. It range from small, specialized groups like the Database QA Team who currently overtake parts of daily QA work, to the new internship program, which should be the main topic for this blog.
The history of Internship in OOo QA area started after an open mail from a representative of the Hitek Computer School - Vancouver (Canada), which is a private educational institution focused on intensive training in Software QA and Software Testing, with a question if we, the OOo Team Leads, can afford their students a practice inside OOo QA.
In principal we already had worked out such an offer inside the OOo QA Reloaded Mentoring concept, but in this case we had several students for a limited time, who need rules, lessons and leading, so our concept had to be enhanced into this direction to not exclude such community groups and keep the community vibrant. So after a lot of mail traffic, we agreed to start a first test run with two former students, which should overtake the leadership of the following student groups, after passing a basic QA training. This was also a good occasion to create and test a new concept and fit it to the belongings of student- or similar groups.
After the course Natalia and Oleg became Group Leads (GL) for their student groups (group1,group2) and joined OOo QA Teams (Calc,Writer) as Team Members. With their acquired rights and knowledge, they also start to lead their groups trough the lessons (replaced the former, more general participation step rules) which include the general techniques and QA knowledge on OOo, with a big practical contingent. We started with ten student and eight finished this basic course. To complete the program, we added an individual project to give the students the possibility to get creative, show what they can and also have a work sample for their further job applications. Unfortunately Oleg had to give up the leadership of his group, because of private reasons, and so Natalia overtook the responsibility for all students. Because of this circumstance we decided to make only one common project and create three groups with three members. At the 25 May all groups had started with the project, which will last three months: Music Database.
bye Chris
tags: community ooo open open-source openoffice.org opensource qa quality software sun
Monday, 29 Jun 2009
Currently the framework team works on OpenOffice.org 3.2 and compatibility with the Windows 7 file picker. If you use OpenOffice.org 3.1 or download the latest developement snapshot you will find out that the system file picker doesn't look like the default Windows 7 file dialog. This is just one issue you can stumble on while using the system file picker on Windows 7 RC1. The framework team created a CWS called filepicker01 (see http://eis.services.openoffice.org/EIS2/cws.ShowCWS?Path=DEV300%2Ffilepicker01) which includes all known issues regarding the system file picker. Fortunately we also have support from a community member to help on the QA part during the development. I want to thank Henner Drewes for his great support, his patches and feedback. This is a good example how people can support us to make OpenOffice.org better. Thanks to his help we could solve some issues in the CWS, especially stability is one of the major areas we are working on. Even new issues have been found and can now be fixed.
To give you an impression on the current state of the CWS you can see a screen shot of OpenOffice.org on Windows 7 RC1:
CWS filepicker01 based on DEV300m50 on Windows 7 RC1
Please keep in mind that this is work in progress and even the latest development snapshot doesn't include the fixes. Hopefully the first batch of fixes can be integrated into the master in the next weeks.
To get more feedback and find problems for Windows 7 early I would like to ask you for help. If you have access to Windows 7 RC1 or later versions and want to help, please join us. You can contact me via e-mail or subscribe to the framework development mailing list. Everybody is welcome. The framework team will help you to have an easy start.
Friday, 27 Mar 2009
For quite some time now OpenOffice.org has been working on a move from the outdated CVS to a modern Distributed Software Configuration Management (DSCM) system. Last year the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) agreed in a face-to-face meeting to start with a switch from CVS to Subversion as an interim step. This conversion allowed us to leave all the dead branches and legacy releases behind. The size of the new repository shrank from the projected 100 GB to actual 6 GB. Since October Subversion is in use on our codelines leading to OOo 3.1 and later versions. As it was planned, now is time to go further and migrate to a DSCM. An in-depth evaluation document has been prepared and presented. It shows the pros and cons of Bazaar, Git and Mercurial. While there is a tendency towards Mercurial there was no clear favorite.
So the ESC decided during the March
9/10 face-to-face meeting to run a survey and consult the OpenOffice.org
contributors. Contributors were asked about their experience with the different existing OOo repositories, SCMs in general and most important what their prefered DSCM for the OpenOffice.org source code is.
149 contributors participated in the survey - thank you. Most of them worked with
OOo's code repositories CVS and SVN. In general participants have
experience with the centralized systems CVS and SVN and quite a few know
distributed systems already - Mercurial is a bit more familiar than Git.

So, what distributed system do our contributors prefer for
OpenOffice.org source code?
To me the correlations to general experience and OOo work were
interesting. There is almost no difference in preference between the
groups who worked on OOo CVS for source or OOo CVS for webcontent or OOo
SVN. These are consistent with the overall result.
But looking at the ratio correlated with the general experience, we see
that Mercurial users are even more enthusiastic about their system than
Git users.
The bottom line?
The system of choice is for 3% Bazaar, for 23% Git and for 49% Mercurial. 25% had no preference.

Let's see which next steps the ESC will nail down on Monday under consultation of the input from the community.
Thursday, 26 Feb 2009
The OpenOffice.org wiki is alive and well. There is more information there than probably anyone knows or may be able to find and enjoy.
As a member of the OOo user experience project, I've created a survey to jump start a revision process for improving the usability of the wiki and therefore making that information easier to find and consume (yummy!) .
If you have ever experienced the OOo wiki, please feel free to get vocal about it by taking this quick survey.
Your wiki will thank you :-)
Liz
tags: community survey user-experience wiki
Monday, 26 Jan 2009
We are short before code
freeze for OpenOffice.org
3.1 and I want to give you an overview about the major community
contributions for the framework project. First of all I want to thank
all contributors for their dedications and commitment. It's a
pleasure to see how hard and target-oriented community developer work
to reach their goal. This part wants to present the work from Ariel
Constenla-Haile, a very active community member from Argentina. If
you are involved in OpenOffice.org development you definitely
stumbled over his name. Some months ago Ariel detected an issue
which complained about the limited abilities of UNO AWT API regarding
menus, especially setting an image for a menu item. UNO AWT is a
project which provides an UNO based abstraction layer above VCL
(OpenOffice.org user interface toolkit). This API is often used by
extension developers to create their own user interface. The
framework team received a patch for this issue from Shi Zhoubo, a
developer from the RedFlag 2000 team, regarding menus and images.
Ariel noticed that the patch fixes the issue but other VCL features
for menus were not part. He decided to overcome the limitations of
the first patch and worked on a complete solution. He analyzed the
present situation and listed what features were missing. He thought
about possible solutions and contacted me for discussion. We
agreed to a solution which provides three additional interfaces for
the missing features. He created patches for the projects involved
and contributed them. Summing up Ariels contribution is a good
example how people can help to fix/enhance OpenOffice.org.
The following image give you a impression what's is possible with this enhancement:
Ariel created a wiki page
to explain what problems extension developers face, how to solve the
problem and what's possible with his enhancement. I strongly
recommend people that are interested using menus in OpenOffice.org to
read his explanations.
If you want to help
us to make OpenOffice.org better please contact
me via e-mail or join the framework
development mailing list. Everybody is welcome to join us. The framework team will help you to have an easy start. Just give it a try to become a development member of the leading open source Office suite.
In my next blog I want to continue the overview with an enhancement regarding keyboard shortcuts.
tags: community contribution framework openoffice openoffice.org