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.

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.

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.