Conference love

This has been a month of frantic activity for the free software office suites.

First, we had an Open Document Format (ODF) plug-fest at The Hague hosted by the Netherlands Ministry of the Interior, who announced stronger enforcement of its recommendations to use ODF. Microsoft announced that it will support ODF 1.2 on all its mobile & other non-desktop Office apps, and the UK government presented its best-practices for ODF usage. The technical part of the plug-fest extended the growing suite of automatic interoperability tests, and a number of fixes were made there and then to implementations.

A couple of weeks later was the Libre Office conference in Aarhus, with several notable highlights. Continuing the ODF thread, it was great to see the Taiwanese government inspired by the UK’s example to adopt ODF as well, with some effective tracking and shaming of miscreants who email legacy, non-ODF documents around. It was also great to celebrate the Italian military’s announced migration of 150,000 seats to Libre Office starting in October.

Collabora also announced our new Cloud-Suite branding, and demonstrated our hard work alongside Ice-Warp to bring rich

Libre-Office viewing and editing to the cloud and hence a much wider user-base, which was much appreciated by attendees.

Naturally, the conference was also a protracted outpouring of shared experience, deeper dives into the feature work of the last year and an encouraging look ahead to where we’re going next.

For those who missed these great events, the next best place to catch up with what’s new and exciting will be at FOSDEM in early 2016 – book your trip now.