OpenOffice.org Down Under!

O3Spaces today announced the immediate availability of O3Spaces Workplace 2.3.0b, the first version of its Document Management & Collaboration suite to include support for Mac OS X. With the addition of support for Mac OS X, O3spaces completes her offering as a true cross platform Sharepoint alternative.

The author of Writer's Tools, a well-known extension for OpenOffice.org, recently published an article about how to use the extension, illustrated with screenshots. Should you be working with Writer's Tools, give this a go!

Our fellow colleagues from Projity today announced that their open source project management software is now being used in over 142 countries and that over 500,000 copies have been downloaded so far, which makes more than 60,000 downloads a month. The usage in both small business and Fortune 500 companies is accelerating rapidly around the world, and OpenProj makes a perfect addition to OpenOffice.org. It seamlessly opens native Microsoft Project files so migrating is immediate - and it is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows in a variety of languages.

The Munich LiMux migration project offers jobs. In total, four jobs are currently open and waiting for your application. In particular, the city of Munich searches for developers and engineers for development of the Linux base client. OpenOffice.org is also part of the migration.

More details can be found in Florian Schießl's German blog.

How will OOo 3.0 look like? We're curious as well about our final brand and design, and so we've started searching for proposals of the new splash screen. Anyone interested in graphics and design, join us, to make OOo 3 a real eye-catcher!

The pre-registration for the OOoCon 2008 is open now. If you want to attend, please help us planning the event by sending the following information to pj at openoffice dot org:

• your name
  
• your nationality
  
• how likely it is that you will attend OOoCon 2008 in Beijing (100%, 75%, 50%, 25%)
• the background of your visit (1: large business like sun, 2: small business, 3: private contributor with a special function at OOo such as project lead, 4: hobbyist)

Your pre-registration will help us to arrange things early and assist you in getting a visa to China, so please support our efforts!

Today, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 was released which fixes some bugs and a potential security issue.

This article is about using a Microsoft free computer. "Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time."

Thursday and Friday, there will be an OpenOffice.org track at LinuxTag in Berlin. Check out our website at http://de.openoffice.org/linuxtag2008/ - and come and listen!

OpenOffice.org has been given a 'Recommended' award by IT Reviews: "The maturity of OpenOffice is fast winning over many of those still deep-rooted in a Microsoft Office way of working, and while this latest release isn't likely to tip too many more over the edge, it's a further move forward in the quest to be accepted as the legitimate alternative that it already is."

There's an interesting article about doing web-based spreadsheets with OpenOffice.org at JavaWorld.

OpenOffice.org wins the 2008 Duke's Choice Award for Fans' Choice. "The Duke's Choice Awards program recognizes the year's most influential Java technology-based applications submitted by developers and companies around the world. The winners are chosen by Vice President and Sun Fellow James Gosling, along with a panel of Java technology experts at Sun." Read more in the official press release.

The first public beta version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 has just been released. We're keen on your feedback to this new version. Read more about it at http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/featurelistbeta.html

Belltown Media, Inc., publisher of the award-winning monthly magazine Linux Journal, has announced the winners of its annual Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards. The 2008 winners appear in the June issue, with awards presented to vendors and organizations in 34 categories, ranging from favorite software development tool to favorite Linux laptop. OpenOffice.org was awarded the prize in the category of favorite office program.

At http://theingots.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=11 there is a free Moodle course for OpenOffice.org by our community member Ian Lynch. The course was done by Gabriel Gurley. Anyone is free to make an account and use the course, it's all free.

In a few days, a first beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be made available, to show the great new features included to the public. We expect to have the beta release ready in the first half of May. Stay tuned for more information on what this new release will include!

The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open organizes the first international Hackontest sponsored by Google as part of informatica08, the Swiss year of computer science 2008. Hackontest is a 24-hour programming competition of three teams of different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance popular Free Software projects according to user needs and to demonstrate to the public how enthusiastically open source software is being developed.

The folks from O3Spaces have released the new version of their Document Management and Document Collaboration suite which is also available in a free version. Link: http://www.o3spaces.com

Today, OpenOffice.org 2.4 was finally released. Thanks to all involved in the efforts!

At this year's LinuxTag, OpenOffice.org will host it's own "mini conference" (not to be confused with the official OpenOffice.org Conference). Several well-known project members will deliver speeches and lectures about OpenOffice.org, it's programmability, the ongoing migrations, the OpenDocument format et al. More information can be found at http://de.openoffice.org/linuxtag2008/