On 23/01/2007, at 12:45 AM, Juergen Schmidt wrote:
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.
Hi Juergen,
Sounds great! Thanks for the help. We might look at what some people
have suggested and opt for 2 streams - programming and users. Will
keep you informed as things develop.
Regards
Jonathon
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