The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0

The new release offers several new features but is focused on contributors

The Internet, June 3rd, 2011 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0, a major release of the free office suite for personal productivity developed by a community of sponsored and volunteer developers, and supported worldwide by local communities of volunteers. LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second major release of the suite since the announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010 and incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).

The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one recalls that the OOo project has attracted a lower number of contributors in ten years. "We care for our developers, and it shows", comments Italo Vignoli, a Steering Committee member and a spokesperson for TDF. "Our core developers have invented the mechanism of the easy hacks, which makes it simple and enjoyable for volunteer contributors to get to know LibreOffice code challenging their development skills with basic or elementary tasks".

"Once they have completed the first easy hacks, contributors are ready to scale to more difficult tasks", says Michael Meeks, a senior developer working for SUSE. "We spend quite a lot of time mentoring new contributors, in order to increase the number of people working on bug fixing, patches and features. This is soon going to be reflected in the quality of the software and the number of new features of future releases".

LibreOffice 3.4.0 offers several new features for Calc, with faster performances and an improved compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, and Pivot Table - the new name of DataPilot - with support for unlimited numbers of fields and named range as data source. The user interface of Writer, Impress and Draw has been improved with many new features, and several cosmetic changes have been applied to the Linux version, with a better text rendering engine and an improved GTK+ theme integration. Code wise, several thousand lines of German comments have been translated into English, and over 5.000 lines of dead code have been removed from Writer, Calc and Impress.

The first release of the 3.4 series, LibreOffice 3.4.0, is targeted to community members and power users, and should not be implemented in a corporate environment. The Document Foundation has explained that following its time based release schedule - the best strategy for a distributed and cooperative development environment - the best releases for such deployments start from x.x.1. Because of this, LibreOffice 3.3.x is going to be maintained for several months to come, until the end of calendar year 2011, for the most conservative users.

LibreOffice 3.4 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/download. A complete list of new features and fixes is available online at the following address: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and-fixes/. Screenshots of the new features can be downloaded from this page.

Full story at zdnet.com.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffice-to-apache/9035

Ithaca College's EdTechDay is a regional technology event that attracts educators and IT staff from across Upstate New York. The event is primarily of interest to the higher education community, however, K-12 educators also participate and find there is valuable information and resources available related to their interests. Talk with major computer and technology vendors, explore educational applications, learn how technology is being used in the classroom, and much more.

Event: Ithaca College EdTechDay ’11
When: Thursday, March 24, 2011
Time: 9:00am - 4:00pm
Where: Campus Center, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York

For more information, including workshop schedules and registration information, visit the ithaca College EdTechDay website at:
http://www.ithaca.edu/edtechday/

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.3.1, the first micro release of the free office suite for personal productivity, to improve the stability of the software and eliminate several bugs and crashes affecting Windows, Linux and MacOS X versions. LibreOffice 3.3.1 also brings new colorful icons based on The Document Foundation branding guidelines, and includes updates to several language versions.

"LibreOffice 3.3 was our very first stable release, and the feedback from users has been extremely positive," says Thorsten Behrens, one of the developers with a seat on the Steering Committee. "We have managed to troubleshoot a large number of bugs within a very short time, in order to maintain our enterprising release schedule. There will be another minor release in a month, before our second feature release in early May."

LibreOffice 3.3.1 has been rolled out only one week after the launch of the funds challenge to collect donations towards the 50,000-euro capital needed to establish The Document Foundation in Germany. An information website has been put online at http://challenge.documentfoundation.org, where you can donate via PayPal or bank transfer.

By just one week after the launch, more than 40,000 euros had been accumulated, bringing the final target very close. All additional funds collected before the closing date of March 21 will be used for operating expenses such as infrastructure costs and registration of domain names and trademarks, as well as for marketing expenses such as travel funding for TDF representatives speaking at conferences, booth fees for trade shows, and initial financing of merchandising items, DVDs and printed material. There is a blog post on this subject: http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/02/23/you-are-our-rockstars/.

During next week end, US volunteers from The Document Foundation will be taking part at this year's Southern California Linux Festival (SCALE) in Long Beach, CA, showcasing LibreOffice 3.3.1 for Linux, Windows and MacOS in Booth #4 in the International Ballroom.

The Document Foundation is at http://documentfoundation.org, while LibreOffice is at http://www.libreoffice.org. LibreOffice 3.3.1 is immediately available from the download page: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

* About The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.

POSSCON 2011 - Join your colleagues in Columbia, South Carolina March 23-25 to learn about open source software.

The Consortium for Enterprise Systems Management would like to encourage you to join your colleagues in Columbia March 23-25 to learn more about teaching and saving money with open source software.

Why?
1. Open Source software can be an excellent way to save money in the classroom and introduce students to Information Technology.  With IT budgets shrinking and fewer kids going into IT, there has never been a time when
this was needed more.  

2. More than 80% of all business and government organizations use open source software in some capacity.  To be adequately prepared for the future, teachers need to be aware of the technologies their students will be
expected to know and work with.  In addition, teachers need to know the best way to teach it.

3. It is a wonderful opportunity to network with your colleagues. In 2010 more than 350 people attended POSSCON from 14 states.  In addition, more than 19 colleges and universities were represented as well as SC school districts.

4. It is a wonderful opportunity to expose your students to a world class IT conference without having to travel to the west coast or spend a ton of money.  Students take field trips to zoos and theatres all the time.  Why not bring them to an IT conference where they can learn more about cool technologies and future jobs?

5. POSSCON is the most affordable world class IT conference you will ever see.  For teachers, professors, and administrators, the cost to register is $79 per person for all three days of content if you use the discount code
'CESM' when registering before March 1.  The first 150 students are FREE. Comparable conferences cost anywhere between $500 and $1800.

Topics and sessions to be featured:
- Open Source 101 - What Does it Mean - How is it Different
- Open Source Resources for Teaching
- Open Source Curriculum for IT Teachers & Next Generation Developers
- Getting Kids & Students Involved in IT/Open Source
- Fun and Easy Programming for K-12
- Learning to Use the Sugar Platform
- Scratch
- Many more

POSSCON 2011 will take place March 23-25 (Wednesday - Friday) at the Columbia Convention Center in Columbia, SC.  In 2010 more than 350 people from 14 states attended.  In 2011, we expect more than 500.

For more information and to register go to www.posscon.org .