Below is the original announcement from the OpenOffice.org project.

The OpenOffice.org community announced yesterday the date for its anniversary OpenOffice.org Conference. This OOoCon in the year of the project’s 10th birthday, will take place from August 31st to September 3rd in Budapest, Hungary.

Full details of OOoCon may be found here:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/

People interested in attending OOoCon 2010 are invited to subscribe to the official mailing list. To subscribe, please send a blank e-mail to ooocon-discuss-subscribe@marketing.openoffice.org and follow the instructions sent back.

We’ve also set up a Twitter feed for OOoCon. Follow http://twitter.com/ooocon to get regular updates.

More details on the event, as well as a Call for Papers, will be announced soon.

For OOoCon 2011, the Call for Location is still running. More details at http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2011/cfl/cfl.html

We look forward to meeting you in Budapest in September!

The OpenOffice.org Conference Team

The main conference theme this year is “OpenOffice.org and Free/Libre Open
Source Software (FLOSS) in Education”, with case studies, best practice,
and research results. In other tracks, members of the OpenOffice.org
Renaissance project will explain how they are aiming to improve the User
Experience of OpenOffice.org, and compare their approach with their
opposite numbers from Lotus Symphony and RedOffice. Workshops will
encourage attendees to join in this activity, help in the QA process, or
join the OpenOffice.org developers.

There will also be a series of sessions around ODF, the ground-breaking
international open standard for storing office software files. Commercial
adopters of the standard will explore how ODF is living up to its promise,
including presentations from Sun Microsystems (StarOffice), Microsoft
(Microsoft Office), RedFlag (RedOffice), and IBM (Lotus Symphony).

The draft Conference Programme, published today, provides abstracts and
speaker biographies for the conference sessions. People interested in
attending are urged to visit the Conference web site
http://www.ooocon.org, download the draft Programme, and register to
secure a place at the conference. Registering in advance helps the
Conference organisers know how many people are coming, and saves
congestion on the first day. Registration costs 10 Euro standard, with a 2
Euro concessionary rate.

The organisers wish to record their thanks to this year’s sponsors:
Platinum: AICA, EurOffice, IBM, and Sun Microsystems; Gold: Oracle,
Redflag 2000, and Yacme; Silver: Engineering without whose generous
support OOoCon could not take place. Sponsorship opportunities are still
available - please see the ‘Sponsors’ link on the website.

The Conference Team

The OpenOffice.org Community invites potential speakers to submit
proposals for papers for OOoCon 2009. Whether you are a seasoned
presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something
interesting to share about OpenOffice.org - we want to hear from you.
Please note the Conference main language is English, but this year we have
a specific session dedicated to education where it will be possible to
submit proposals both in English and Italian.

OOoCon 2009 will be open for speaker registration and the submission of
proposals on July 13th, so start working on those proposals now!

For full details, please visit the OOoCon website
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2009/ and click on the ‘Call for
Papers’, ‘Track Policies’, and ‘Timeline’ links.

See you at OOoCon 2009!

The OOoCon 2009 Team

When it comes to small packages, like for example a video player (Windows media player versus say Videolan) all things are quite easy as the main controls (Play, Stop, Rewind, etc.) are basically the same. So, using one or the other may be the same for a user. It becomes a bit more complicated when you try to manage advanced functions like playlists. There you will need a little more effort.

Same happens with larger software packages (for example an office suite like OpenOffice.org versus Microsoft Office suite) but at a different level of effort. Everybody who is used with one of them tends to say that the other is not doing the job. This is only because using an office suite implies more than 3 or 4 controls like in the case of video players.

An employee will, in most cases, argue that the office suite he or she is used to is easier and better than the alternative presented in a test-run before a migration. And managers, afraid of loosing money because of the possible slowdown in productivity due to software change will tend to listen to what employees have to say.

To state the obvious: being used to a certain software package does not mean it is easier to use or that it is better than the competition.

All the software packages have, aside from features, some bugs and lots of workarounds to avoid the problems in usage they have. By using them you learn those workarounds and in time you tend to ignore the bugs. But learning those workarounds requires some effort.

Migrating an organization from a software package to another means developing and using a strategy in minimizing this effort of transition and identifying and dealing with the problems either real or imaginary. At this step, in the OpenOffice.org office suite case consultants and community support may be of great help.

In times of economic downturn looking at software alternatives and taking the time to know them may make the difference between survival or bankruptcy, especially for small and medium enterprises.

Adoption of Free Open Source Software, like in our case the OpenOffice.org office suite instead of spending money on software licenses - can let you direct financial resources to other areas of your business. All you have to do is study a bit, know the new software and stay focused on your experience, not on what others say.

Today’s financial difficulties sent many businesses back to the drawing boards in an effort to rethink their future and find new resources. One of those boards is the “cutting costs board” and one of the solutions is rebuilding the company’s IT strategy on Free Open Source Software.

Managers: Back there when there was only one office suite, you had no choice but to learn it together with it’s problems. And don’t tell me it was easy to do it. But now there are alternatives (with their own bigger or smaller, real or fake problems), but certainly with important advantages like no licensing costs. Spend some time to get acquainted with them. It saves your business money.

Need more information on migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org? Take a look at this migration guide.

• Business adoption - how to make/save money and gain profit using Open and Free Technologies;
• Government, administration and public schools - the importance of Open and Free Technologies;
• Professional growth participating in the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) community;
• Break the code - tips and tricks, things you will not find in IT bocks.

High profile keynote speakers from: Google Inc. - IBM - MySQL AB - Mozilla Messaging (the latest Mozilla Foundation subsidiary) - European Commission - Gartner, Inc. - Python Software Foundation - Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology - eZ Systems AS - OpenOffice.org - Mozilla Foundation - Navarik Corp. - ActiveState Software Inc. - Free Software Foundation Europe - APTI Romania (The Association for Internet and Technology) - Mozdev Community Organization and more.
For more information you can check http://eliberatica.ro website.

This year we have received a record six proposals from teams competing to
host this prestigious event. In alphabetical order, they are:

* Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* Beijing, China
* Bratislava, Slovakia
* Budapest, Hungary
* Dundalk, Ireland
* Orvieto, Italy

If you were a registered member of the OpenOffice.org community on January
1st 2008 then you are entitled to vote. Please read the details of each
venue carefully, and decide where you would like to attend OOoCon in 2008.
Once you have made your choice, please cast your vote.

For full details, please visit: conference location proposals page

Voting closes at midnight UTC on February 29th., and the winner will be
announced shortly afterwards once all the votes have been verified.

For more information about OOoCon please visit: OOoCon pages.

The OpenOffice.org Conference Team

The author - a satisfied Microsoft Office user - expresses his pleasant surprise about OpenOffice.org.
He outlines the fact that OpenOffice.org installation process went smooth, simple and didn’t take over the file associations of Microsoft Office and the installer even recommended not associating MS files if one is only evaluating OpenOffice.org.

In a world in which every program you install literally attempts to take over your entire computer and life (See default options in instant messengers, various audio players, Adobe Acrobat, etc. which bring together tons of browser toolbars and stuff which make your computer slower), what the guys from Installation project of OpenOffice.org did, a simple, clean, non-intrusive installation process is a big plus.

You can read the original posting in The Kratzers blog.

Way to go OpenOffice.org!

P.S. If it were a contest, I’d propose their posting for a prize.

This tutorial is inspired by How to extract the images from a .doc file using OpenOffice.org Writer tutorial which explains another way of extracting the images through exporting the pages as HTML document. The HTML method is good especially if the images are .GIF or .JPG files. But if you have for instance .WMF files in the Word document and you want them in the original scalable format or without loosing information through compression, you need another way of extracting them:

Ingredients:
- the OpenOffice.org free office suite, either installed or the portable version available at PortableApps.com website.
- a .DOC document containing the images (here is a sample DOC document we prepared for you sample-images.doc which contains two cliparts in form of WMF files and one PNG image)

The few simple steps:

1. Converting the .DOC in .ODT files:
–> Open the document in OpenOffice.org Writer
–> Save the document in ODT (Open Document Text) file, the native OpenOffice.org file format (from the File menu choose Save As and in file type select .ODT)

2. Use a file manager/browser to rename the saved ODT document to .ZIP and unpack it
–> Open a file browser and go to the ODT document (sample-images.odt)

–> Rename the .ODT document to .ZIP (sample-images.odt –> sample-images.zip)

–> unzip the document in a folder

3. Get your original embedded and uncompressed images from the PICTURES folder inside the ZIP you unpacked.

THIS IS IT! As simple as easy.

Explanations:
This tutorial takes advantage of the (ODF) Open Document File format and the fact that the document is in fact stored as a ZIP archive, containing the original texts and styles as XML files and the Pictures in their original format in a sub-folder in the archive.

Open and Free:
Of course, the openess of the file format “opens” endless possibilities for creating applications to interact and use the documents you created in OpenOffice.org office suite and the documents you imported from Word.

Unlike the MS-Office file format which is closed, using an ODF based office suite (like OpenOffice.org) means - as you have seen from this tutorial - the freedom to do whatever you like with the files and documents you have created, even without waiting for the developers to create a special tool for extracting the images from the document. Such a feature is missing from Word too.

Enjoy the taste of freedom! …and please drop a comment and tell us your experience and opinion with the above.

This short tutorial will show you how to create dynamic presentations in OpenOffice.org Impress able to display graphical images (figures, charts, etc.) which incorporate latest changes in the reality back at home. You can have last minute information which you had no time to update, presented live to your audience at conferences through your slideshow. You can have your team back in the office assembling last minute charts for you and when you start your slideshow, the charts will show up in your presentation.

Ingredients:
1. The OpenOffice.org office suite. I use to carry with me a portable version of the application on an USB stick, available from http://www.portableapps.com
2. An internet connection
3. A web server which either automatically generates the needed images and charts or where your team uploads by FTP the images having a predefined filename.
4. You need to know the exact URL of the images you are going to display

Creating the presentation:
1. Make sure your internet connection is opened and that the images are available on your web server.
2. Create a new presentation in Impress with the layout you desire. Reserve the space in your slides for the dynamic images you are going to insert.

3. Go to Insert menu and select: Insert -> Picture -> From file…
4. In the file selection window check the “LINK” checkbox so that images are not cached locally and then type in the “File name” box the exact URL of the remote image you want to insert (e.g. http://www.yourserver.com/dynamic-img-1.png)

5. Click the Open button and wait until the remote image appears in your slide.
6. Resize the image as needed, test the presentation and then save your file.

Note: each time you open up the presentation in Impress, the images will update from the Internet presenting you the latest data (for instance: the hit counter from the website).

If you need to update the images without closing and re-opening the presentation, simply follow these steps:
- go to the Edit menu and select Links: Edit -> Links…
- in the links window, select the images you want to reload from the internet and click the Update button

- close the window and you will see the updated images in your presentation

Show time:
- In conferences make sure you have internet connection available on the computer you are using for presentation.
- Open up the presentation in Impress and start conferencing. Of course you need to pay attention to the updated figures or charts too, in order to adjust the comments.

This tutorial takes advantage of a less documented feature in OpenOffice.org which allows you to deliver valid Internet Addresses (URL) instead of a file name in the Insert Picture dialog box.

There can be various usage cases for this feature and different technical ways of having new data created on the server which delivers you the images. You can either have a web script dynamically generating the images you need or you can have an operator in you office uploading the images you use in the presentation.

Good luck with your presentations and please drop a comment if you encountered problems or if this worked for you. Having friends traveling and conferencing ? Send them this article.

Have fun!

It still has the notice “This article does not cite any references or sources. (September 2006)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.”

Since there are many supporters for all the office suites listed, it would be good to have this page updated with everything it needs.

The page is located here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites

By the way:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.