Hi Jonathon,
thanks for this interesting summary of the event. I would be happy to
participate next year to present on programmability features of
OpenOffice.org in general and in detail. Maybe it is also possible to
organize a workshop or some kind of hands on lab.
Feel free to contact me directly, i have plans to evangelize the
programmability features of OO.org more and more in the future. Any
pointer,invitation to big events where we can reach a huge audience is
appreciated and helpful.
Juergen
Jonathon Coombes wrote:
Hi All,
Here is a report of what happened with the OpenOffice.org miniconf.
Thanks to the efforts of Jim Watson, a great day was organised and we
had a registered attendance of 90 people. Some of the talks attracted
more people that others, but overall was a great day with some
interesting feedback given as to how people are accepting OpenOffice.org
more.
+++++++++
The OpenOffice.org miniconf is run in conjunction with the main Linux
conference LCA2007 which was from 15-19th January 2007. The miniconf was
a great success based not only on the number of speakers, but also the
number of people attending. For one whole day, people of like minds
gathered to discuss what OpenOffice.org is capable of doing, and what
they would like to see happen in the future for the project.
I opened up the miniconference being the new Australian Marcon, which
Jim Watson had organised. The first speaker was Michael Cardon from the
Australian National Archives talking about the Xena project which does
document conversions for long term standard format conversion. Michael
was even able to demonstrate some of the clever features such as working
out document formats even when trying to trick it.
The next session was a Q&A session with some demonstrations of
OpenOffice.org. Unlike in the past where many of the questions were
related to "howto" style questions, they were much more project related
and how things would evolve in the future. Some of the demonstrations
were excellent with Bill Robertson from De Bortoli Wine's demonstrated
the new ODF viewer running on his Symbian mobile phone. This showed that
OpenOffice.org is reaching much further than just the user desktop at
work. Stuart Guthrie from Polonius then demonstrated his project that
integrates JavaReports into OpenOffice.org to generate templated reporting.
In the afternoon, Michael Still and Stewart Smith gave there experiences
in trying to write a book using OpenOffice.org. Some of the usual
hurdles people have were not considered as they were done with layout at
the editors, but other problems could have easily been solved by using
the master document feature of OpenOffice.org. Michael came back later
in the afternoon demonstrations to have a look at master documents and
how they worked in summary. This talk was finished off by a summary talk
from Leslie Hawthorn from Google Summer of Code project giving details
of what that was and how it would help with the OpenOffice.org project.
Jim Watson got a good gathering of people interested in how the SDK
worked and some of the details of what UNO was and how it can be used to
program OpenOffice.org. The afternoon was finished off with me giving a
talk on Base and how it works involving a live demonstration. This was
well received with a followup session immediately after with some live
workings with forms, xforms and some simple macro programming ideas.
As a side mention, the open day at LCA involved a desk with
demonstration of the OpenOffice.org software which was kindly run by
Graham Lauder and Jim Watson. It was good to see people coming up and
trying out features. Thanks guys!
Over the coming year, organisers are discussing possible changes in how
the miniconferences are done at LCA. This means possible changes such as
over multiple days instead of one day or other changes. It may even mean
the option of having a separate fee for those who want to come only to
the miniconference. So these options will be futher investigated over
the next year. All up quite a good miniconference and hopefully we will
see much more like it in the coming years.
+++++++++
Regards
Jonathon
