Netherlands government launches ODF service at Italian Plugfest

OK, a big "Huray!" for Sander please. Because he's the mastermind behind Officeshots, and one of the people really making a difference in the 'open document standard' world. For example, with a bit of luck, in the feature I can see what my CV looks like in MS Word without having to actually poses a license for MS Word. Hmm, life will be great, huh? Best thing since sliced bread!

All jokes aside, I really think this can help adoption of ODF and other open documents. Big companies actually get to see how their documents look like in different suites. Those interested / advocates / hackers can compare implementations. Looking for differences in implementations will be easier.

Congrats Sander, to finishing this important project. In my opinion this really makes a difference when it comes to document interoperability. More than the Novell / Microsoft interoplab ( http://www.moreinterop.com) where gazillions are spent on (to make shiny interactive animations and dress people in orange, that is). We as LXerers should be proud to have you as an editor.

As far as I am aware, the project is a bit delayed, but which IT project isn't? Now this is finished, I hope you will not be bored! Good luck with answering questions about it (I guess there will be some).

HURAY!

Finished? When is a project ever finished? Along the release was the first extension (public galleries/showcases) and I have a whole slew of feature requests lined up in the bug tracker: http://code.officeshots.org

As for testing Word Officeshots: I have a working client (Word 2000/2003 + Sun plugin). We even got a few MS-Office licenses but we're waiting for the new server in Norway to come online. It's a big-@ss machine donated by Nokia that we can run dozens of VMs on.

I have a Windows machine running the Officeshots client at home, but apparently OpenOffice.org and the Sun plugin for Office bite each other when they are both running as background services at the same time. I had to choose so I chose to serve OpenOffice on Windows for the time being.

OK, good to hear you're not bored! Now we wait for the big-@ss machine in Norway.

BTW Why Norway?

Because the university there donates the space, power and bandwidth for it :-)

Hmm, well, I was wondering if it was the same university that hosts PATS (NTNU Trondheim I guess). Both Nokia, Sun, Microsoft and other 'usual suspects' are supporters of PATS.

If so, I guess Nokia sponsoring this has something to do with KOffice coming to their phones: They are helping out because they want to make sure MS Office documents can be viewed on the Maemo platform. Sounds like interesting news to me, but probably I'm seeing things in the fog which might not be there. Nonetheless, the KOffice team has been working hard on better ODF support, KDE is working hard on bringing QT to Maemo, so...

So they hope Officeshots will not be a tool for the office, but a tool for the benefit of working with documents while not in the Office. "Mobileshots" or something. Yeah, I smell the future.

Hurray hurray!

Nokia sponsors Qt/KDE. One of the KDE developer has been posting patches to KOffice2 that allows you to do document conversion from the commandline so we could easily integrate KOffice2 into Officeshots. We just don't have a VM to run it on and that where Nokia helps out (We have one VM server donated by another company but we can't give the KOffice guys access there to build it).

We're going to do cool stuff on it like building nightlies of KOffice and hooking them into Officeshots. AbiWord and Gnumeric are already doing the same. So if you come across an ODF interoperability problem you can report the bug, and when they report it fixed then you can check it yourself in Officeshots a few days later. It makes interop testing much easier.

Other things lined up for the future are integrating ODF validators, automatically running the official ODF test suites and of course more application support :-)