The OpenOffice.org conference is now over. We had some fantastic three days at the INSA of Lyon, and I would like to thank everybody who managed to drop by and visit us. People came from all over the place; Korea, Brazil, India, Bengladesh, Germany, Norway, U.S.A...
This conference could not have been possible without the Francophone community, of which I am a member; so I would like to thank everybody who helped us before and during these three days!
On Monday evening, the 11th of September, we organized the Native-Language Party on a ship that cruised the Rhone and Saone Rivers along the city of Lyon. Besides the actual venue that was outwardly marvellous and very classy, I would like to say, just like I did to one of my American guests there, that even though I didn't mention the 9/11 in my welcoming speech on the ship, I had the feeling that the actual presence of so many people on board, coming from the entire world was in a sense, a beautiful answer to the international terrorism. For Open Source does also mean peace. OpenOffice.org and the Native-Lang Confederation are living evidences of this. I am honoured to lead such a confederation of communities who are building something useful together, and I can experience this on a daily basis.
Now I'm sure you'll be interested by the pics and the transcripts of the conferences! So here you will find the videos and some pics of the conferences. Not all of them have been uploaded yet, so make sure to check back there again for several days. Kudos to the Kiberpipa team from Slovenia who accomplished all this while being asked at the last moment!
Here you will find lots of pictures taken by Jerome D. from Ars Aperta. Here, and also here and there you will find shots from Florian E., Jesus C. and Simon B. from several Native-Lang projects.
The OpenOffice.org Conference is as always the time for major announcements concering the software itself. I recommend that the interested readers take a look at the still being uploaded slides of every conference for more details.
However, I shall disclose the major points that were discussed in Lyon. First, OpenOffice.org shall get Firefox-like extensions capabilities by the 2.0.4. This release should be ready somewhere between the coming week and the end of the month. What this means is that besides the fact that OpenOffice.org could include extensions before, now the way to develop, include, select and manage them will be made easy. Aside the traditionnal .zip and unopkg extensions packages, a new and definitive extension format, .oxt, shall be used across the extensions that can be developed using a breadth of languages ranging from StarBasic to Java. New wizards and configuration tools shall be added for the benefit of our endusers.
Second, and I think that although we have no clear roadmap for this yet (besides, our version naming scheme is going to change once again ), OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future. Besides the inclusion of those two softs inside the office suite, connectors to Sun Calendar Server and Microsoft Exchange will also be developed accordingly.
Third, a word on the 3.0. A few months ago we change our release process as to accomodate more and more community's input and patches; and so we switched to a fully incremental, quarterly release schedule. Which in turns, makes the famous 3.0 rather unpredictable as to what its feature set and characteristics could be. This is why it is useless to look for a weird prototype of it quietly sitting in a virtual Area-51. The only objective of the 3.0 will be to make it much more modular and running on tops of frameworks such as Eclipse, Netbeans or Mozilla's XUL.
In any case, feel free to get a look at the conferences' slides, they are really worth it... And as you may not know, OpenOffice.org will celebrate its sixth anniversary, so stay tuned!!!
