09 November, 2008

KOffice rocks

The KOffice Sprint in Berlin is still going strong. The more sleepy among us just arrived at the KDAB office, while the others already had half a day of work behind them. I really feel we did some incredibly useful marketing work, which will make a difference for KOffice. We should definitely have a marketing meeting to prepare for the upcoming 4.2 release of our software, to define key messages & work on the announcement and other some other promo texts.

The developers also have done great stuff. Instead of writing C++ they spend their time reviewing the gui, with the help of usability guru Ellen. And there was fun. We went out for dinner last night, that was cool. Not just because I like food (I really do) but also because it resulted in some weird photos. You'll probably see them appear on some other blogs soon ;-)

I'm sorry the articles about the meeting aren't online, some "dependencies aren't satisfied yet", but it'll work out, really.

Finally but not least, the best thing about the meeting is excitement. Sure, not everybody is jumping around all the time, but there definitely is cool stuff going on. If we manage to reach our goals and do a decent release, I'm pretty sure the world will see the potential of KOffice. And join us making it really great.

5 comments:

  1. I hope to see koffice replace my openoffice installation... it's too big, it's too slow and it's too....GTKish... :)

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  2. @ anonymous: don't expect KOffice to be able to replace OO.o anytime soon, esp if you use the more advanced features. KOffice needs more resources to really take advantage of it's architecture and get up to feature parity with the big boys. Feature parity is actually not even on the radar for the developers. KOffice will focus on it's strengths - flexibility and adaptability for specific usecases. It needs developers focusing on specific goals and users.

    Btw OO.o isn't using GTK - if it was, it would at least be less of a NIH show ;-)

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  3. jospoortvliet made a very important and true statement. KOffice is not about competing with several years old office suites which have developer and financial resources like MS Office or SO/OOo. It's about flexibility and integration.
    But I wonder how can seemingly small companies like softmaker ( http://www.softmaker.com/english/of_en.htm ) develop their products in such a tremendous pace while even achieving high compatibility (in many respects better than OOo) to MS Office. I hope the "comercial" KOffice ( http://www.kofficesource.com/ ) will succeed any-time soon.

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  4. Perhaps Nokia could be interested in development of KOffice now that they bought Trolltech? In this case they would have office suite for symbian and maemo if it's possible to scale KOffice to those devices and it could be ported to android too. At least reading documents would be great.

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  5. Ok, it's not to be better than openoffice, but at least replace it for basic functions (i don't use stuff very complex, at least for now :) ).
    (but i think that koffice doesn't support very good ms formats, right? i've to start to send back odf to people who send me doc :) )

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