The free and open productivity suite

Abstract: The session will provide information about new features of the extension infrastructure and how to use them. It will further give an outlook to future enhancement or features. The new features include: Package manager renaming: Introducing the term extension in the UI. System integration: Easier installation of extensions through file browsers, web-browsers, e-mail clients. Extension versioning: How the extension manager uses the version. Extension identifier: Uniquely identifying extensions. Installing extensions with the same filename. Online update: Requirements for extensions and infrastructure. Options: Integration of options pages in OOo's options dialog and Extension Manager's options dialog.

Abstract: Most people know OOo only as an Office suite, enabling people to create fancy text documents or doing complex calculations. Only a few know about its open file format ODF (OpenDocument Format), and even less know that OOo is build of components which can be used independently and for very dedicated purposes, e.g. as document viewers or document converters. This session aims to give a understanding of what OOos components are, how they might be used, and where the trends are going, all together forming the extended OOo ecosystem.

Abstract: In this research, we used a different approach in the development of a Tagalog spell checker and grammar add-in for OpenOffice Writer. We used a third party open source software as resource and parser. This system can be used in Linux or Windows OS.

Abstract: One of the problems that appears during the existence of FOSS projects is the maintenance of the sustainability of themselves. The assumption that project will always sustain itself, independently of the participation of governments, corporations and users is out of question, but a point remains: know if the development will be active, desired and deserved, with the structural and financial independence, for projects like OpenOffice.org. Projects like this are strategic in questions like innovation and technology fixation, fighting against foreign exchange and resources evasion, against digital exclusion, showing a real path to country growing, specially of sub-developed and under-development countries, and on this point, the local communities has a fundamental role that could and must be accomplished in order to maintain the central project. The support of local communities need to be rethought, turning them wider, not being limited to localization or syndication, but instead, helping to improve the ecosystem made by community, market and development, making the project sustainable and independent as a whole. This way, local communities need to put themselves in a new level, taking a position of opinion makers, collecting resources and financing developers to create code in their respective countries by various actions formalized through a NGO. In Brazil, actions like partnerships, agreements and resource collecting, are some of the activities developed to achieve these goals, and most of them are doable with the communities in almost all countries, sustaining the OpenOffice.org ecosystem. Sharing these actions and activities is the objective of this work.

Abstract: Multiracio Ltd. has a long history of working with OpenOffice.org. Starting from a Hungarian localization we have moved to outfitting our multi-language version with numerous additions and modifications and we are now moving to and extension-based model. The benefits of this move are for the users, the developers and for the OpenOffice.org community. The users can buy just the functionality they want instead of the full package, and also use it on any flavor of OpenOffice.org. As developers, we have experienced a faster development cycle and a clearer separation of responsibilities in the code. The community benefits by the availability of our extensions for OpenOffice.org, but also by a number of open-source additions to OpenOffice.org that were needed by some of our extensions and may be useful for others too. The presentation will include demos of some of our extensions (such as the map chart) as well as technical details of the extension development process.

Abstract: Nowadays, a productivity suite can not be only a program for document edition. The edition function of the office suites is now a fact, however the document life cycle and management importance is growing. Many external products are competing to provide these document management features. Among them Alfresco, a free Enterprise Content Management provides useful features using a web client interface. OpenOffice.org has a role to play in the management of documents. Far from reinventing the wheel, OpenOffice.org has to integrate the ECMs. This session is about the integration of Alfresco features into OpenOffice.org. The session will include a quick presentation of Alfresco, but will present which features have already been integrated and what needs to be done. The integration will be demonstrated to better illustrated the presentation.

Abstract: Integrated tools for spelling, style, and grammar checking OpenOffice.org's lingucomponent project has three major goals: provide spell checking, grammar and style checking, and thesauri for as many languages as possible. The talk will give an overview of the state of all these projects, with an emphasis on grammar checking. Spell checking has greatly improved with the integration of hunspell in OpenOffice.org. However, a spell checking software is worth nothing without dictionaries. The talk will show how dictionaries can be built and how free sources like Wikipedia can be used to extend and update existing dictionaries. Grammar and style checking is the natural next step to complement a spell checker. With the release of LanguageTool and its integration into OpenOffice.org much progress was made in the last year. The talk will show LanguageTool's features, its integration into OpenOffice.org and how easy it is to add support for new languages to LanguageTool: rules to detect errors can be written both in XML and in Java source code. Examples will show the broad range of errors and style issues that LanguageTool can detect. Unlike a spell checker, LanguageTool can show a detailed description of the problems it detected. This makes it especially suited for technical documentation where the writer is often required to adhere to a specific vocabulary. Future versions of LanguageTool will be more tightly integrated into OpenOffice.org using a common grammar checker API that will allow on-the-fly checking of text. Creation of high quality thesauri is also a task that requires quite some manual work. However, using the OpenThesaurus project new thesaurus can be developed by a community of users using a web interface. The talk will show how to create a new thesaurus for a language that's not yet supported. OpenThesaurus will then export it automatically to the format used by OpenOffice.org.

Abstract: One of the most common business processes inside an enterprise application, is managing and delivering reports (i.e. orders, invoices, statistics, etc). These processes usually require domain-specific expertise which seldom matches with J2EE/.NET knowledge. Moreover rarely J2EE/.NET experts are skilled to code programs to generate report automatically with Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. Based on Berkeley University's Ptolemy II engine, Recito implements actor-oriented programming platform which allows, by means of a powerful and easy graphical development environment, to design and execute hierarchical and complex block-diagram models. An actors library, wrapping OpenOffice.org API functionalities, managing database connections and manipulating XML dataflows, has been developed. Such actors allow to compose actors together in order to create document and dataflow manipulation models. OOo actors cover Writer and Calc fine-grain functionalities, so that each actor covers a single OpenOffice.org feature. Moreover an Axis-based deploy engine has been developed in order to encapsulate such models into web services. The result is to provide a graphical IDE for a user friendly dataflow manipulation and report programming which can be used in enterprise applications. Recito is an Open Source, multi-platform, Java-based application and includes three components: - Recito Designer based on Eclipse RCP technology, the GUI to realize and simulate actor oriented models. NOA plugin allows to create programs and visualize results (ODF Documents) in the same environment. - Recito Core operative layer based on PtolemyII engine. - Recito Server to deploy and expose actor-oriented programs through a web service interface.

Abstract: Using the OpenOffice.org Plugin for NetBeans, the session will show how easy it can be to develop extensions for OpenOffice.org. The session will cover these topics: - Introduction to the OOo Plugin - Wizards for creating Extensions: e.g. Add-On, Calc Add-In - Create, Deploy and Debug your Extension - Support for description.xml - Outlook

Abstract: The native C++ application Mobile Office is the first and currently only OpenDocument implementation for the Symbian platform as well as any other mobile platform. For the first time, it is now possible to view its office files from OpenOffice/StarOffice on the go without the need to convert the file and compromise on any available ODF features. As this is a great new possibility for lawyers, consultants, accountants and all other users of OpenOffice, I would like to present this to the OpenOffice community. Mobile Office Homepage: http://www.sept-solutions.de/English/office.php Mobile Office Screenhshots: http://www.sept-solutions.de/English/office_screenshots.php Topics: 1.Introduction to Mobile Office and its background 2.Available versions and very short introduction to available Symbian devices 3.Live Demo of available features with mobile connected to projector

Abstract: As you might know there is a new Chart module in OOo. The old module had several limitations regarding maintenance and extensibility. Therefore, it was not refactored but instead entirely rewritten from scratch. This sounds like a huge task, and it was. In my talk you will hear about the experience we made in re-writing the chart application and what we learned from it.

Abstract: This session presents the current status and efforts of Sun's OpenOffice team contributing to the Mozilla Calendar project. A good calendar client is still the key missing piece towards a full OpenSource Office migration. Lightning, an integrated calendar for Thunderbird, seems to be the most promising solution. The presentation will cover the basic architecture and techniques, but focus on the current status of the project (including a demo). Moreover, it provides an outlook what's to come (roadmap).

Abstract: The new OOo smart tag API provides a means to associate actions with document content. For example, some piece of text 'xyz@abc' might be recognized as an email address. A possible action associated with the smart tag type 'email address' could be to add a new contact to your address book. Developing a smart tag component consists of two parts: - Implementing a smart tag recognizer. - Implementing smart tag actions. This session gives a general overview of the smart tag feature and shows how to develop smart tag components for OOo Writer.

Abstract: GravityZoo has started its OpenOffice.org porting project with the goal to bring OOo to the Internet. An essential first step is the creation of an OOo Collaborative environment. This presentation explains the working of this collaborative environment as well as the work involved in the porting of OOo components to the GravityZoo Framework. Once OpenOffice.org is ported, it will become a suite of online productivity applications. Apart from the collaborative dimension, it’s not to be distinguished from a locally installed version. The GravityZoo Framework itself is a networked computing platform. All files and applications live on the network where they are accessible from any network-enabled device, be it a PC or a handheld device.

Abstract: Presentation of the system implementation, including my experience as a first time OpenOffice.org contributor who has never coded outside of Windows, and never outside of college projects.

Abstract: There are terrific open source alternatives to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Microsoft notes that 7% of all Office users are also Project users. Microsoft Project is included in the Office family. What are the opportunities for OpenOffice users with an equivalent open source solution ? This session will discuss.

Abstract: The topic we would like to cover deals with UNO functions and applications. We have worked out a plugin that incorporates Taverna's functionality into Calc. The original idea came from Prof. Jerzy Tyszkiewicz and the work was done as a BSc project under the supervision of Jacek Sroka. Taverna appeared as an effect of cooperation of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), IT Innovation, the School of Computer Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle Centre for Life, School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, Nottingham University Mixed Reality Lab, Biomoby project, Seqhound, Biomart and many other institutions. This is a program that allows its user, a biologist or a bioinformatician, to make complex data analysis using both local or remote data and computational resources. This is done by letting a user create a workflow representing how data are processed: where they are taken from, which processors (the Taverna's most basic entities that process the data) should be used, their interdependencies and when and what can be done parallelly. Then, by clicking "Run workflow", the workflow is evaluated. Our plugin enables to perform these actions within OO Calc. We have programmed a mechanism that allows to put the processors into the spreadsheet as usual cells. The whole responsibility of inferring dependencies and making computations parallel is put on Calc's formula evaluating engine. With a help of our add-ons, the user puts the processors into the sheet and decides where their inputs are. After creating such a sheet, he or she clicks an appropriate button and the "workflow" evaluates. This approach opens up new possibilities for the users: -the data, the final and the intermediate results can be subjects of any action that is possible in Calc: making graphs, acting as arguments for other formulas, etc. - the data are easily organized in the sheets and documents - it offers to use an open, widely used format (Open Document Format) Moreover, it improves the ease of use: virtually everybody knows how to use a spreadsheet. The plugin has been programmed in Java. It uses many features that UNO and OO API make available: add-in functions, add-ons, new services. We would like to make a case study on this project, which would cover such aspects as: -the identification of the original ideas -actual programming and its operation -how it is written -the application of the used UNO and OO API features -problem areas in the project -difficulties we had exploring, learning and using UNO and OO API -our suggestions to make people write OO plugins Summary: We would like to present a practical use of UNO and what can be done with it. It would also be a great occasion to share our experience of learning UNO and OO API and programming a plugin with them. The case study would include the cause of writing such a plugin, the success, the difficulties we encountered and a new plugin developers' suggestions.

Abstract: OpenOffice.org vs Microsoft Office classic battle has been in the annal of “feature vs. feature comparison” in which Microsoft try to justify their “superiority” by showing their interface is more mature and better. It is a tiring game. Meanwhile, while people do still care (a bit) about how Microsoft can create a “slightly better BOLD or more unique ITALIC” in their document, with the emerging of web 2.0/work 2.0/office 2.0 collaboration, workflow and participative connectivity around people’s world of work, soon (and increasingly) what people really need -- and shall be really increasingly concerned about -- is new seamless ability for their desktop system to become a “natural front-end” to their connected business processes, and to their collaborative/participative/connected activities daily. The presentation will elaborate 3 core ideas to leapfrog Microsoft Office existing feature strategy, and various ways to position OpenOffice.org further into the future as a leading connected “web 2.0/work 2.0/office 2.0” front-end, rather than just as a great “offline office front-end”. Based on experience trying to integrate OpenOffice.org to the “Web 2.0 workflow and collaboration mechanism” the past 1.5 years, the session will ty to share some key design and architectural perspective, as well as summarize and elaborate key technical feature and API capability areas where the “Next OpenOffice.org” system might need to be complemented and technically improved, so that the next OpenOffice.org release will gain technical superiority in this emerging "connected work productivity" segment. After this “NetOffice” initiative, the Microsoft’s old trick and theme of emphasizing on their “technical bold & italic” shall not become big matter anymore. Seamless desktop-to-web front-end connectivity, web-interaction security and ability of OpenOffice.org to act as the most natural front-end for “Web 2.0/Work 2.0/Office 2.0 connected processes/interactivity” is the one that really matters. The next release of OpenOffice.org perhaps has the chance to innovatively make happen something that truly exciting and innovative; something that innovatively redefine the future of “desktop computing”, enhancing the power and betterness of the connected-world society as a whole; something that contribute greatly to the advancement of the world's upcoming participative community in the future; something that goes simply “beyond Microsoft”.

Abstract: In the current version of OpenOffice.org there are seperate filters each of the MS Word formats (.doc,.rtf, XML). A closer look reveals that there is a common structure underlying all the formats. The MS Word core "shines" through. To reflect this fact we started implementing a new filter that handles all formats using a modular design. There are modules that handle the specific characteristics of the formats and a domain mapper module that maps from the MS Word universe to the OpenOffice.org universe. In this session we discuss the design of the new filter and give an overview about the status of the project.

Abstract: Last May a British colleague of mine, who has lived in Sweden for more than 10 years now, told me that, in the fist place, in migrations you must explain the reasons and give some figures to the management and to the tech guys so that the “Why are you doing this?” question may be answered. Yet in his experience, when it comes to the common user, the question you're more likely to face is “Why are you doing this to me?!?”. In fact the management and tech guys are more keen on acronyms: ROI, TCO the first, ODF, PDF the latter. On the contrary, common users are absolutely afraid of changing the way they have been doing things ever since they had a computer. The most frightening fears are graphical interface/function changes, handling document exchange with third parties and the perception of not being as skilled as before in this new environment. We have had some experience in OpenOffice.org migrations so far, what I would like to do with this presentation is to share some of our tips & tricks, which can help you to play that match. We will talk about what you should do before you start deploying OpenOffice.org, what you should take into account and take care of, how you should re-create a comfortable environment for users and also about what amazing Openffice.org can do itself to let users sleep tight.

Abstract: This talk will present a config browser extension for OOo, quite similar to the mozilla about:config facility. Because larger parts of OOo's configuration are not accessible through any UI, modifying things like caching and buffering strategies, ldap settings, or font substitution lists currently requires editing xml files by hand. The config browser extension relieves the casual config hacker from this burden, and provides UI for every configuration item. Besides demoing the extension (and what can be done with all those hidden config items), the talk will also showcase the powerful combination of UNO with a modern scripting language like Python - which facilitates rapid prototyping of quite complex solutions.

Abstract: In this presentation, Lexatel Technologies will show a way to integrate presentations with MySQL databases using py-uno, explaining our case. This system has been introduced by Lexatel Technologies in several production environments. The result is a screen providing useful graphical information contained in the clients' databases, adding a valuable service to Lexatel Technologies products. The aim of this conference is to show the community how these Python libraries have been developed, which problems we have found and how we have fixed it. It also aims to provide a service which is already available for other office software suites. It is possible to start using the system without any development: only preparing a presentation and writing the SQL queries in a single configuration file. In this way, the system provides an abstraction layer which separates design and programming worlds, in order to simplify design changes.

Abstract: Dialog windows are often used in office automation projects. Well designed and professionally built dialogs will increase the worth of your projects, while, on the contrary, dialogs with a poor design and unconsistent behavior will discourage users, even if your project is really outstanding. The goal of this presentation is to share my personal experience in designing and programming UNO dialogs, using at the best the available controls or customizing them when they don't fit my needs. At the end of the presentation my new BasicAddonBuilder extension will be introduced. This extension brings the user through a wizard-driven step-by-step creation process of a UNO package from a StarBasic library, including the definition of customized toolbars and menus that are deployed within the created UNO package. This is also a good example of the discussed programming techniques. Outline: - Introduction: UNO dialogs and controls - The Gimmicks library - The Tools library - The Wizard paradigm - Using the Roadmap control - Extending AWT controls with StarBasic - In the beginning was The Frame - Extending controls: The Scrollable View - Extending controls: The “Rich” List View

Abstract: A vibrant developer community is an sine-qua-non condition for a long-term viability of any FOSS project. In this talk, I would like to follow up my last-year motivational TrainedMonkey speech and put in practice its message about marketing the project rather then marketing the product as such. In this talk, I show prospective developers the domain where they could make difference. Point out possible low hanging fruits that could help them to feel the sweetness of being an OpenOffice.org developer. I would also like to walk the audience through the processes and typical workflow of an external contributor to OpenOffice.org as well as through possible alternative workflows. People attending this session are encouraged to attend the workshop which follows on "Marketing to Developers".

Abstract: After running a GUI test with the VCL TestTool Application, the result needs to get evaluated. Step by step hands on session: * What is a good result? * Differences between Errorlog, Warnlog, QAErrorlog * How to analyze a bad result?

Abstract: A crash course in OpenOffice.org Calc designed to help the participants learn the basics of the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet module. 1. Working with worksheets 2. Entering data 3. Formatting data 4. Using charts 5. Working with formulas 6. Good worksheet design style Participants in this course are expected to bring their own laptops and have the latest version of OpenOffice.org running on the operating system of their choice. All participants will receive free study materials (books & CDs) for their personal use. Class size limited to 50 students or less.

Abstract: Hands on tchniques for debugging OpenOffice.org with Apple XCode or Emacs using gdb, emphasizing techniques specific to the OOo code base, such as displaying strings and soft linking libraries built with debugging support.

Abstract: The Marketing Project has traditionally focussed on marketing the OpenOffice.org office suite. However, it also has a responsibility to attract contributors - particularly developers. Developers: why do you work on OOo? what got you started? what are the highs and lows of OOo development? This workshop provides an opportunity for discussion and debate - not a presentation. If you are interested in this topic, you will probably also want to attend the preceeding session "Proceeding the TrainedMonkey way".