ApacheCon EU 2014

In 2013 the Municipality of Trieste (Italy) decided to migrate to Apache OpenOffice. The main goal was to adopt ODF as the document standard format for all the 1800 users on about 1550 PCs.
A change management approach, with a focus on the users to lower the changing barriers has been used. Davide Dozza will present the project activities and how technical, human resources and organization issues have been faced and addressed.
Moreover challenges on Apache OpenOffice adoption in enterprise environment will be discussed.

The sun never sets on the OpenOffice localization community. Volunteers from all continents help translating OpenOffice, its documentation and its website into dozens of languages.
We'll discuss the localization of OpenOffice both as a community story and a technical story. The community was restarted from scratch at Apache and welcomes new volunteers on a regular basis. Tools were developed and extended at Apache to help translators, with benefits for all Apache projects.

It's already two years since OpenOffice graduated as a Top Level Project at Apache. We have more than 100 million downloads and a stable, working community at Apache. In an overall "state of the project" talk, we will see what we accomplished so far, what worked, what can be improved, what Apache gave to OpenOffice and what OpenOffice gave to Apache. Then we will see what can be accomplished in the medium-term future and how the community resources can be used to those aims.

Developing code within the huge, and sometimes daunting, Apache OpenOffice code can sometimes be very difficult, specially if you only want to add a very specific piece of code that few people want.
As part of an ongoing effort to improve the Operation Research capabilities within Apache OpenOffice, I will try to document the different parts of an Apache OpenOffice extension.

Apache OpenOffice supports a framework called UNO, Universal Network Objects, for developing extensions. Extensions can be written in C/C++, Python or Java.

The UNO documentation is somewhat sparse and most of the developers end up taking some existing extension and use it as a template to write their own. This introductory talk will consider the characteristics behind UNO and will provide the basics to write such applications.

At the Denver ApacheCon last April, I presented on the evolution of OpenOffice, and the need for a good quality, compatible solution for mobile devices.

Participants suggested establishing a project in Apache Labs to address this problem. It would depart from existing architectures but could reuse some elements from OpenOffice where appropriate. It would be lightweight, portable, and independent of legacy code.

A good starting point would be UX Write, developed by Peter Kelly. It only runs on iOS at present, but most of the code is cross-platform, and could be made to work on Android and other systems. Peter and I have discussed the idea of open-sourcing parts of the app under the Apache 2.0 license. The app uses HTML natively, and WebKit for displaying documents on-screen, and supports import/export of .docx, export of LaTeX, and could be further extended to support ODF.

Apache OpenOffice (AOO) defines a scripting framework that can be exploited to add any programming language to Apache OpenOffice as a macro language. This presentation introduces the necessary overview and knowhow to become able to assess the effort to add your own favorite programming language to AOO. Although the AOO scripting framework is implemented in Java it is possible to add non-Java-implemented programming languages as demonstrated with the programming ooRexx which is itself implemented in C++. In addition all scripting languages that support Java's "javax.script" framework could be added to AOO using AOO's scripting framework.

A well-known XKCD comic parodies the industry's solution to standards proliferation: a new, "universal" standard to replace all its predecessors. We all know where that leads. In this talk, I'll discuss an alternate approach that deals with the mess without creating more of it, in the context of word processing.

We want software that can read and write multiple formats, which means creating lots of filters. These should operate in a non-destructive manner, allowing modifications without losing information during conversion. I've been working on this for the past couple of years as part of UX Write - supporting HTML, Microsoft Word, LaTeX, and soon, ODF. I'd like to share this work with the community.

Let's pool our efforts and start an open source project to make these and new filters available in a way that can be used by everybody, for any purpose, and on any platform.

Automated Changes on OpenDocuments (Svante Schubert, Freelancer) - The OpenDocument format (ODF) consists of compressed XML files. ODF is read and written by many Office applications; the Apache ODF Toolkit (incubating) provides the ability of an easy automated access. In this presentation, Svante Schubert will describe how recent changes of the OpenDocument format in the OASIS standard for version 1.3, allow interoperability for real-time editing and how this is being mapped to the ODF Toolkit in a way that even collaboration with OOXML and HTML applications (such as browsers) is possible.