OpenOffice Conference Barcelona - Keynotes and Advertising Discussion

Wednesday's start of the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOo) kicked off with two keynotes. OOo Community Manager Louis Suarez-Potts presented "OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Beyond," in which he discussed the next year of development, and Hu Caiyong, CEO of RedFlag 2000, described his company's customization of OpenOffice.org to create RedOffice for the Chinese market.

Louis introduced some of the features scheduled for the next major release of OpenOffice.org, after version 2.3 which just arrived on Monday. OOo 3.0 is scheduled for mid-2008, and will include a PIM (Thunderbird plus the Sunbird calendar extension, which have received significant attention from Sun's professional developers), a strong focus on OOo Extensions to provide niche functionality and great flexibility without adding bloat, complete Mac OS X support, and "Web 2.0" features like saving documents to blogs and wikis, among other features.

Other sessions through the day introduced new tools and methods to integrate OpenOffice.org with web content management system workflows, discuss technical details of the standard OpenDocument Format, and present the results of the project's annual user survey, which has found continued adoption by new users in home, educational, and work environments.

Furthermore, I gave my own presentation in the afternoon. Titled "Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper," I described my effort of July 2006 to collect donations online and purchase a full-page, back cover advertisement to promote OpenOffice.org in the Metro. Reception was good, and I spoke with some other community members interested in carrying out similar promotional campaigns around the world.

The general mood of the conference is extremely positive, and we have seen many examples of countries, companies and individuals adopting the OpenOffice.org software, or the ODF file format for interoperability. The community is planning for a phase of rapid growth, bolstered by its previous technical achievements and the recent addition of powerhouses IBM and RedFlag 2000 to the formal community of developers.

Editor's note: This conference coverage was provided by Benjamin Horst who is an OpenOffice.org volunteer and creator of the Wikipages.com wiki business directory.