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My Center Networks Guest Blogs on OOo Con

Center Networks published a second story about my time at the Barcelona OpenOffice.org Conference, covering Louis’ keynote on features planned for OpenOffice.org 3.0, scheduled for summer 2008. Among those features long desired by the community, OOo will bundle a personal information manager (Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar extension, which Sun engineers have been contributing to for the past few years).

I also presented my own talk on Wednesday of the conference. Quoting what I wrote for Center Networks, “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.”

CN also published my recap of the conference from Friday, its last day. While North America is seeing steady growth in the use of OOo and the OpenDocument Format (ODF), it is truly blooming in Europe. A session analyzing data returned from the voluntary user survey reached the conclusion that Europe is at a tipping point, as governments are adopting ODF for storing their data, government agencies are rolling out deployments of OpenOffice.org reaching hundreds of thousands of users at once, and desktop Linux users running OOo as part of their open source stack seem to be appearing almost everywhere.

This year’s OpenOffice.org Conference was a great success. So much progress was made in the global OOo community in the past 12 months, yet the pace is set for even faster growth in the next 12.

2 Responses to “My Center Networks Guest Blogs on OOo Con”

  1. JZA Says:
    September 26th, 2007 at 11:47 am

    Hey Benjamin, I really enjoyed meeting you and the conference in general it was awesome. Please make sure to get ur presentation posted at the OOoCon presentations. I really want to spread it around slideshare and the OOoES community.

  2. Benjamin Horst Says:
    September 26th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

    Alexandro, likewise, great to meet you and to attend my first OOo Con! What an enthusiastic, capable and idealistic group of people we had. My presentation should be available from the conference website, but I have also uploaded a copy here: http://www.solidoffice.com/about/presentations

    Feel free to take it and spread it around to anyone who might be interested. I’m happy if others would like to modify and use it on their own too.