I'm back from the QA weekend in Essen, Germany. The meeting took place at the "Linux Hotel" - Villa Vogelsang and it was coordinated by a team from the "OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V.". There were about 18 participants from Germany, Swizerland, the Netherlands and from Mongolia.

Most people came on Friday afternoon and in the evening we had a barbecue and we had a lot of fun... On Saturday morning Jacqueline Rahemipour and André Schnabel started with a tract about the current translation process and how it is seen by the German community.
Then Stefan Baltzer and I talked about the mission and dependencies of QA work within the project. Topics like "compliance of deadlines" and how it relates to QA work or if checks of already integrated issue fixes having the state "verified/fixed" help to identify potential problems of the integration process of child workspaces were discussed. Then we talked about creating synergies between the QA teams of OpenOffice.org native language teams. We discussed that it might be relevant that contact persons of different native language QA teams are published on the QA web page to be able to ask for advice.
After a lunch break Cor Nouws from the Dutch native language team informed us how QA work in the Netherlands is coordinated and he talked about other activities in the Netherlands like an "OpenOffice.org Café" that will be started as an event in a town near the Belgian border in June 2008. Then Badral Sanligiin representing the Mongolian community talked about his work on translating OpenOffice.org into the Mongolian language. It was very interesting to learn about this project. He said that UI translation is about 90% complete and he will commit it back to the OpenOffice.org code base in June/July this year as well as he commited patches that are needed for the input method needed for the traditional mongolian written language as it uses complex text layout that is different from the Cyrillic alphabet that is commonly used nowerdays. In the evening there was some kind of bug hunting party with a focus on the current developer snapshot BEA300_m2. It was a late night.

On Sunday Helge Delfs demoed his (still local) version of the QA status page called "QUASTE". Using this web application it will be possible to upload testtool results to a server to get immediate feedback about how this test results eg. of a CWS build relate to the master workspace where this CWS has been created on. Afterwards we talked about QA work on child workspaces and how someone can get information from the EIS webapplication. After a brainstorming session about spoilsport for community members and how to address these problems at the end of this weekend we talked about how to do some advertisement for QA application related sub projects.

All in all it was a really productive meeting and it was really good to have members of other native language projects who shared their knowledge with the other attendees. Special thanks go to Jacqueline who mostly planned this event.

tags: community event openoffice.org qa

I'll attend this year's CeBIT 2008 trade fair in Hannover, Germany from March 4th to March 9th.
If you like to visit our OpenOffice.org booth then please come to the "Business Solutions Park" in hall 5, E57.

This trade fair event at CeBIT 2008 is planned by OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. and there are following exhibitors: OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V., SCAI, O³Spaces, Mobility Office Solutions AG and last but not least Sun Microsystems.
Azul Coffee, Duden and LinuxHotel are supporting our activities.

You are welcome!

tags: community events extensions openoffice.org staroffice

tags: community council openoffice.org

tags: community openoffice.org usability user-experience

i am sure that most of you have already seen or even better have visited our Extension repository. I always have fun when i take a look on the growing number of extensions. You can already find some useful stuff there and that is great. The whole thing is part of a vision that i have since years and i am looking forward to more really cool extensions.

But most important from my point of view is the community building aspect behind extensions. I mean the extensions where no company is behind, i mean the small  things where individuals start simply work on something new. Or where they start to provide an existing feature in a more intuitive way. See for example the Pagination extension Mathias mentioned yesterday. People start working in there own small universe (mini projects). They learn the API and other basic concepts that are necessary to program with and for OpenOffice.org. They can partly use modern IDE's to speed up not only there initial work no their daily work. Features like code completion are common today and make developer's life much easier. No complex build system is necessary to get started. A further big advantage is the fast feeling of success. And we all know that it is often the motivation to do more. Developers that start today with an extension might be the main developers from tomorrow.

And with more complex extensions the demand for better or new API's to do more things via API is growing as well. Part of that is implicitly often a better modularization in the core. Well that is not obviously but i think it is true. Internal hacks are not possible anymore (at least theoretically), we need clear and well documented interfaces making new features available for extension developers.

The extensions infra structure is evolving  and we've got useful new things with the last three releases and we will do so with the next. Let me highlight the extendable help feature that is making good progress and that will hopefully coming soon. Related to the help feature I am looking forward to an adapted filter for our help format to make it easy to write help files with the office directly. Localization support for the repository is ongoing and it will help us to reach more users all over the world. A localization community as we already have for the office would be nice for extensions as well and we will see how we can align all these things and how we can benefit form the existing community here.

I hope also that we can focus on further improvements and new features for our OpenOffice.org API plugin for Netbeans (currently it's somewhat stalled) because as i have mentioned above tooling is important to attract new developers. So you can help us to give feedback and let us know what you would like to see or where we can do things better. I know a lot of small things that we have not addressed yet or that are simply bugs but i would really like to here your feedback.

And for all of you who get started with extension. Don't give up when things are not working or are not possible at all. Simply let us know about the missing feature or the not working API's and we will fix them (most often quite fast). I also made this experience by doing something that was not the standard and we detect several problems in the toolkit and our dialog descriptions. But hey we took the source, fixed it on our cws and moved forward. My managers know that i am really no fan of our toolkit. But as long as we don't have a concrete plan and no concrete intend to replace it with something new or something better we have to live with it. But dreaming is allowed and i would like to have at least something like Matisse the GUI editor from NetBeans or a descriptive approach like XUL.

At the end i would like to point you again on the Smart Tag feature that was introduced for OpenOffice.org 2.3. A nice tutorial can you find in the wiki. Jacob Lechner made this feature possible and i think he was driven by some demand for it in his company. Anyway think about it for a while. Somebody needs a feature that doesn't exist, he simply started the work, got all the support he needs from Frank Meies and in the end he got the feature and the OpenOffice.org project got a further nice service provider interface (SPI) that allows fast integration of some nice features in the writer. You can help and can implement some nice Smart Tags as extension. I have already tried it for a workshop demo and was able to implement a simple one (with our NetBeans plugin) in 30 minutes or so. So just do it!
 

tags: api community extensions openoffice.org

tags: community features framework

 What a great event and what a beautiful location we had at the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 within the University of Barcelona. People came from around the world to take part at this event and I believe most of them were satisfied by the location, program and the spirit that everybody felt. I've uploaded some pictures of the OpenOffice.org Conference to flickr. I used the tag ooocon2007 which is also used by others who uploaded their pictures as well. Our friends at Kiberpipa did some videos of various conference tracks. I'm looking forward to the next conference next year.

tags: community ooocon openoffice.org

	You can see even more pictures from the OOoCon 2007 in Barcelona here on Flickr. The images also appear in the Slideshow posted earlier by Matthias. Here you can see two previews. One of Peter Junge doing a talk about RedFlag Office in the Cathedral-like conference room. The other one is from the Aqua-Porting Party in a nearby hotel. It was an interesting conference again, with interesting people in an interesting city.

tags: community ooocon openoffice.org

From 19th to 21st.September lots of people interested in OpenOffice.org joined OOoCon 2007 in Barcelona. Located at the University of Barcelona the ambiente was really stunning IMHO (you can see some impressions on the right side); Kudos to the organizers for creating such a great experience for the visitors.

Lots of interesting presentations, some of which may bring stunning new features to OOo (and tons of work for developers ;-) ) . Most notably for gsl I think are gravity zoo's plans to port OOo to their platform making OOo completely network transparent - I'll be interested to see how that works out - and the UI rework finally adding layouting capabilities to OOo's dialogs. On the mac front  we discussed a lot of issues, planning our move towards releasing the final mac version along OOo 3.0. An interesting proposal came from Michael Sicotte to integrate QuickTime to for media streaming to OOo Mac. And last but not least some issues were solved during the conference (well actually on the party after the conference :-) ).

 OOoCon 2007 certainly was a great success. And now that we're back let's put life behind the visions created here and make OOo still better than it already is.

Issue solution in progress

Planning for the future.

tags: community gsl mac ooocon openoffice.org vcl

tags: community ooocon openoffice.org