OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2007) is taking place this week. Among the first information available is a talk about the future of OOorg.
The conference is held in Barcelona until Friday. The first talks were today, and first files are available.
One of the keynotes was titled “OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Beyond” and of course caught my attention. The PDF for the talk (1.5 MB) looks looked a bit clumsy but is now fine. and is hopefully not the result of the best what OOorg hast to offer. But the content is nevertheless interesting: as it looks like, OOorg 3.0 is supposed to integrate better with current Web 2.0 techniques. The idea is to be able to create Blog posts and wiki entries right from within OpenOffice.
Also a new personal information manager (PIM) will be integrated – this might even be based upon Thunderbird. The background is most likely that OpenOffice – as nice as it is – still has nothing comparable to Microsoft’s Outlook. A fully integrated PIM with calender, e-mail support, appointments and schedules could give OOorg quite a boost in corporate environments.
Another aim is to expand the extension system. The focus in that development will be on creating an extension system which can be easily used by developers to create rich enhancements. The famous Firefox success with hundreds or even thousands of extensions is the motivation for this step I guess.
Last but not least a PDF import filter is marked as a release goal. According to the plans hybrid PDFs will contain ODF code as well as the original PDF code.
Of course there are numerous other improvements listed with a lower priority or with a smaller impact. One of them will be a better Presenter console with support for multi screen setups. I’m looking forward to that in combination with the new XRandr 1.2!
Anyway, one thing I’m really missing is real collaboration. While the “Shift in focus” lists the first main goal as “A global participation and collaboration suite using Web 2.0 features” there are only examples like a blog export and a wiki export function. But that is not really collaborating in the sense of an Office suite. A real collaboration suite would require an instant messaging client (think of Jabber here) and in the best case also a collaborative writer system. But there is nothing at all about such functions listed in that PDF, and I’m afraid we won’t see anything like that in the next OOorg release. Sad somehow because such features could really draw more attention to OOorg.
Update:
I forgot to mention the release date: OpenOffice.org is scheduled for spring or summer 2008 according to that presentation. That means that the new version will be available next year for the Linux distribution releases in fall 2008.
/home/liquidat 
And something like an interactiv table builder in a point & click style ?
well
features are ok, but I really don’t mind most of them.
what really cares me is the speed at launching openoffice. In my machine, Microsoft Office takes about 3 seconds to launch, and OpenOffice need about 15. That’s why i use Microsoft Office for documents I want to send to other people, and Abiword for documents which only my eyes will see.
slooooow launch speed gives a sensation of slow computer, bad software, … it keeps lots of people away
Excellent! Good find. Not that I use OOo (LaTeX does everything just fine), but a rich office suite, other than just Web services, is a doorway to Free software and independence from Windows shackles.
This is great news, a good office suite is a vital in getting more open source adoption. Openoffice is a heavy hitter, with large backers. I hope Openoffice manages to improve performance in the 3.0 release as well. So many nice features shouldn’t come at the cost of being slower than the competition.
OpenOffice.org is slower than m$ office because m$ office uses the windows library but OOorg uses GTK api
so, for starting m$ office libraries he need are in memory! but for OOorg, needed libraries must load into memory!
:مهرداد
I’m pretty sure that OOorg does not build upon Gtk+ but on its own graphics toolkit.
But you’re anyway totally right that OOorg needs to lighten these libraries in regards to memory consumption!
No mention of REAL outlining, the way Word does it? IMHO, this is the single biggest flaw of OOo, and has been promised since forever. It’s heartbreaking to see that it isn’t even on the map. I’ll be watching Abiword and Koffice and any others that don’t look like they’re stuck in the mud.
As for collaboration, learn from Lotus SmartSuite. Ten years old team collaboration in Word Pro 97 is still better than anything else.
boy, so they are gonna duplicate evolution, thunderbird and Kontact in OO.o? Instead of making the current (crappy) software a bit better? What a waste of resources…
I guess they are adopting Thunderbird more or less, so it won’t be that much duplication – hopefully.
As for Sun, their latest JAVA update 3 is accompined by a free down-load of OpenOffice. Well: it’s free anway, but it’s good promotion! As for the growing problems with the time used for OOo from clicked on to ready-to-write (& in possible connection to that: still more often the “don’t answer”-message occurs in combination with the program getting real started) – can some cause be related to the for instance Windows-XP ground-program I for my sake is bound to use, than’ks to the set-up of my notebook? This growing problem I hope will be solved in the coming releases & generations of OOo, because it’s the best idea of a writing program!