The current setup of websites for downloading OpenOffice.org installation sets provides builds for several languages and operating systems. But nowadays a lot more are built. Unfortunately they are not that easy to find as they are on mirror servers. The most users do not know this or how to come to these mirrors.

Furthermore there was no comfortable way to download language packs (currently for 96 languages !).

Another reason is that many native language teams have only a small staff or do not have the time to test all available Release Candidate (RC) builds on all platforms for their language. However, these are very close to a final release but have not got the latest tests. But why not offering these to the users with a hint to be carefully when using?

To improve this situation and to deliver more choice we have created a new download website layout.

Main Download Page

http://download.openoffice.org

This website was enhanced to download easily the build you want. Of course the well-known (green) One-Click download remains the same easy way to get your favorite version. The same for the orange button for Developer Snapshots. The new thing is the yellow button that will guide you to the website for Release Candidates.

Full Installations and Language Packs

The improvements were done here to provide all available stable builds:

http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

The first table provides all full installation sets as stable release of the current OpenOffice.org version. The second table provides all stable language packs.

BTW:
A language pack contains only resource files for a specific language and platform to show, e.g., menus, dialogs and error messages in your language. If translated it may contain also the help content. It's a comfortable way to get several languages without to install the applications double and triple. After installation change the languages via menu "Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages - User Interface".

Release Candidates

http://download.openoffice.org/all_rc.html

Some days ago the 100 millionth download of an OpenOffice.org build was announced. We hope to increase this impressive number with the new download websites.

Happy downloading. :-)

tags: beta build candidate download languagepack openoffice.org qa release snapshot

tags: download openoffice.org statistics

• You need to know only one location for getting unstable releases (Dev Builds, RCs, Beta).
• The Look & Feel is the same like the main download site, so you don't need to search for your link to download.
• Only one location needs to be updated to make the newest builds available.
• Only a few data needs to be changed instead of 1-3 websites completely.
• No longer any dependencies regarding version numbers in links and URLs.
  

tags: download next openoffice.org qa release snapshot

Welcome OpenOffice.org 3.0

Yesterday OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released, in the first 24 hours over 350000 downloads were initiated over the main download-mirror system bouncer. It could be more but the huge traffic on www.openoffice.org  bear down the web-infrastructure on the site hoster. Hope the next days will bring up the service back on a stable base.

The download system of OpenOffice.org was updated a week ago to support extended mirrors. Main reason for this is the increasing number of localized download sets for the office suite on all supported platforms. By the way, we support Mac OS native! - Image we have seven standard platforms, four of them have the alternative with/without JRE, so in real we support 11 download sets for each language. Typical download sets have a size between 120-150 MB. In sum we have a huge bunch of bits and bytes which is too much for normal mirrors with limited size. The new extended support brings up us in the situation to have more localized downloads in our mirror system. Good for the community and the spoken languages in OpenOffice.org. That was so far on the software side.

But this was not all, hardware was also updated. Sun sponsored a new server for the bouncer service of OpenOffice.org to handle the number of increasing downloads version by version. So in combination of hard- and software we have a good system to handle the new version.

Some features will come up later, therefor we have an wiki page for bouncer enhancements. It's not forgotten, explicit named here the geo-support!

And now let me say thank you for the support by Oregon State University Lab. Everyone did a great job to have the whole system running in time before OpenOffice.org 3.0 release.

tags: download ooo openoffice.org tools web

Downloads on OpenOffice.org

First, let me congratulate the Mozilla community on the very, very high download number of Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours. The download-day was in my eyes a great success for the Mozilla community. Marketing and all background-members of Mozilla.org did a good job and raise the bar for a software-rollout.

Back to OpenOffice.org and its versions. Looking back on our last download numbers we can see them increasing version by version. We grow over 20% from Version 2.3.1 to 2.4.0. Now the 2.4.1 started and it looks good to beat our own record.

Some possible reasons for the strong growth

Well, certainly our OpenOffice.org is a good product, for free and localized in many languages. We have extensions to extend office functionality if needed. In the back-ground runs the update-service to guarantee that the user get the latest updates. Apropos notification, our friends from java.com notified by each java-update that you can get the office productity suite. Big thank you for this hint! - But beside this we also changed some things in the web-area.

The OpenOffice.org website-team, here explicit named Maarten and Ivan did a very good job changing the whole web-design to a new look-and-feel plus a redesign of our pages. This improves the usability enormously.

Another factor is the one-download-click that enables the user to get the download starting with one-click from the homepage or the download main-page. In numbers, before we started with the one-click and the redesign of the pages 10% of visitors started a download of OpenOffice.org after visting the homepage. After the introduction of the one-click and the other web-changes 20%. Hey, this was a big step forward to grow.

Expectations for the future

The OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 is on the way and I believe it will break our previous download-numbers. Looking at Firefox and their version number 3, I hope we will also have a big success with our upcoming OpenOffice.org 3. Please help testing and fixing latest issues, get the Beta!

tags: download ooo openoffice.org web

The new OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 release exceeds every previous download numbers.

Good to hear this. But the next upcoming questions are targeting statistics about platforms, languages and other criteria.

This request is not new. A try to get these data in the heterogeneous world of the OpenOffice.org projects including the native language projects is to use tags. A few months ago, during the OOo-Con Sept. 2007 in Barcelona, Stefan Taxhet asked the native language-leads to do so. We started with the Dutch project and have found an easy way to put them into the download-pages without any changes in the look and feel for the user.

Currently three other native language-leads beside the one for English-US agreed to modify their pages:
French (finished), Russian (finished) and German (comes soon) community. Many thanks to all of them.

The fruits of the work can be found on the Dashboard OpenOffice.org Downloads. The data will be updated daily and I believe it will help to have a better focus on customer needs.

tags: download openoffice.org statistics tools

${mirror_baseurl}/contrib/rc/${pv_path}/\
 ${pv_product_short_name}_${pv_path}_20061201_${os_path}${lang_path}${os_extension}
${mirror_baseurl}/contrib/rc/${pv_path}/\
 ${pv_product_short_name}_${pv_path}_20061130_${os_path}_${lang_path}.${os_extension}
...

OOo(product name)_Version(incl. date stamp)\
 _OSCPU_what_locale(optional _wJRE).ext

tags: bouncer download openoffice.org