Hello World,

Not a lot of time to blog lately. Again, I have some nice posts coming (as soon as I have some times) related to Active Directory Migration approach and how to avoid unexpected behaviour.

This is not the subject of this post.  As you’ve probably read a little bit everywhere, Oracle (the new owner of the OpenOffice trademark) has decided to discontinue the support provided to the Open Source Office suite.   Hopefully, the code is indeed open source and some developers have created the “Document Foundation” which will be responsible in continuing the development of one of the most famous open source Office Suite. Because the OpenOffice name is indeed trademarked, the Foundation had to come with a new name : LibreOffice. The current version is 3.30 beta 2.

I have installed (for me) and for some other users, customer friends the OpenOffice suite.  I’m waiting the stable release to perform the move to the new “LibreOffice”.

This Office suite is usable and can perfectly replace the costly Microsoft Office Suite in specific situation.  The LibreOffice is compatible with the Windows format (from 97 up to 2010).

I hope that the foundation will bring a new impulsion to the development and that the next releases of the software will bring new features and a better and more current User Interface.  Visually, the software hasn’t evolved much and look like a windows 2003 office suite. But please, do not try to copy the Microsoft’s Ribbon thing. Try to come up with something else that would make the difference and would push people to use this Open Source solution.

update :  Do you think that a web version of LibreOffice would be a good idea ? Web applications start to be popular. Maybe developping the web version would help also LibreOffice to gain more popularity ?  Just an idea…

Till next time

See ya