OpenOffice.org

1 September 2004 - OpenOffice.org, home of the world's leading
open-source office productivity suite, today announced a packed
programme for their second international conference.

Following the success of last year's inaugural conference, which drew
over 300 developers and users from government, education and business,
the OpenOffice.org Conference 2004 is scheduled to take place from
September 22-24th, 2004 at the Humboldt-Universität, Erwin
Schrödinger-Zentrum Adlershof in Berlin, Germany.

The NWF, starting in March/April 2003 with posts to dev@gsl, is an extensible way to use the native look and feel of the host platform as the GUI of OpenOffice.org. The goals were to be minimally invasive, but maximize the visual appeal in the shortest time possible. The project has proved to be fairly simple and easy to code thus far.
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This makes very interesting reading:
http://tools.openoffice.org/releases/q-concept.html. The document basically outlines the plan for OpenOffice.org 2.0. A significant portion of the document deals with GNOME integration. From a quick read, it seems that there is some overlap with what the Ximian guys are currently doing.

OpenOffice.org is proud to announce the immediate availability for
download of the new version of its award-winning office suite,
OpenOffice.org 1.1, for Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP), Linux (x86 &
PowerPC), and Solaris[tm] Operating System (SPARC platform edition) in
English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese (simplified &
traditional), Korean and Japanese.

OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC is ready for general use. It
replaces our legacy build, OpenOffice.org 1.0.3.1, which lacks the new
features making
OpenOffice.org 1.1 revolutionary. OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC not only
includes features introduced in 1.1beta, such as export to PDF,
SWF, DocBook, and improved on-line Help, but also:

Existing single-user installation update capability
Integrated Bitstream Vera fonts
Built-in proofing tools and hyphenation for many
languages
Better Microsoft Office filters

OpenOffice.org
1.1 RC | Features

OpenGroupware.org formed through SKYRiX open sourcing its Groupware server

July 10, 2003 - OpenGroupware.org (‘OGo’) project announces its formation and the release today to the worldwide open source development community of its groupware server software. The software provides the server components necessary for full office collaboration with the OpenOffice.org suite and various other Linux and Windows groupware clients. OGo software runs on Linux and Solaris (www.OpenGroupware.org)

Sander Vesik wrote:
We are gald to announce that the Beta 2 of the next version of
the OpenOffice.org Office Suite - OpenOffice.org 1.1 - is now
available for download.

Openoffice.org 1.1 Beta2 represents a significant advance in the
application and incorporates the features and changes introduced
in the developer builds over the past year. The release includes
a massive amount of new and exciting functionality, features and
bugfixes compared to the OpenOffice.org 1.0.x releases, the
highlights of which are...

OpenOffice.org 1.1beta is ready for immediate download. It is a stable beta but still has bugs. This release represents a significant advance of the application and incorporates the features and changes introduced with the developer builds of the last year. These include:
# Many new import/export formats such as PDF, Macromedia Flash, DocBook, several PDA Office file formats, flat XML and XHTML
# Support for Complex Text Layout (CTL) and languages such as Thai, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew

There has been lots of speculation on what Ximian has been doing with Open Office in prepartion for the GNOME 2 based version of Ximian Desktop. Well Michael Meeks made the slides from his presentation at the Open Office conference in Germany available, which details some of the changes done by Ximian.
You find the slides here.

OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 is ready for download. Technically a "micro" improvement, one in which many bugs have been fixed, 1.0.2 is, according to reports, significantly faster than 1.0.1. There are no new features. To learn about all the bug fixes 1.0.2 incorporates, read the Release Notes.

Here's the latest about what the OpenOffice Project is up to for language support, new platforms and development partnerships.
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The new developer build, 643, is
ready for download. As with any new developer build, this release
showcases new and interesting features, such as Native PDF export
capabilities and a Macro Recorder, among many others. For more information,
see the Release
Notes. The build is also likely to be a lot less stable
than OpenOffice.org 1.0.1, so be warned.
As with any developer build, we want you to:

Download it;

Test it ; and

Find bugs and file issues. The QA
Project coordinates this process, so if you are not a member
yet, please consider joining.

New in this release are:

• upgrade of the mozilla integration from 0.9.5 to 1.0
• inclusion of a .pdf installation guide in the package
• several fixes to font handling code
• improved portability
• improvements to handling of locales
• and numerous other minor bugfixes

The OpenOffice 1.0.1 release is from the OpenOffice.org stable branch
(OOO_STABLE_1) and work on bugfixing, portability and small incremental improvements will continue on it towards future 1.0.x releases.

OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 is available for download from here.

In an effort to make OpenOffice.org more palitable to *nix users, myself and Nestor Dv have been working to replace the rather unsightly OpenOffice.org icons with ones produced by OpenSource artists.

I just uploaded the first version of my OpenOffice.org Gnome2 theme. It's far from finished, but you can see it in the screenshot gallery.
The download link and install details are on the site.

I think it looks cool, hope you like it. Suggestions welcome.
MArk

I recall a dozen years ago, when I used to work in the developer tools distribution channel, a company from Germany released a solidly engineered cross-platform GUI (graphical user interface) library. As an exercise to demonstrate the capability and utility of its product, this company produced a fledgling word processor called StarWriter. Soon, other applications followed, and finally a full office suite called StarOffice, which acquired a strong following in Europe.
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