Lone Wolves

Officeshots.org has finally gone into Beta this week. It took a lot more work (and time) than expected but we made it nonetheless. At the moment the beta is a closed beta, available to current contributers and members of the OpenDoc society. But we hope to start with public, free availability within a month. Joining the OpenDoc society is free for FOSS projects, so if you are interested in the beta, please join them.

Below is the full press release.

Officeshots.org available in closed beta

"Free webservice lets user compare office applications"

's Hertogenbosch/Den Haag, May 19 2009

The Netherlands in Open Connection and OpenDoc Society are happy to announce the immediate availability of the beta of Officeshots.org, a free webservice that allows users to compare the output quality of office applications. The Officeshots project entails both an open source service framework, and a free online service based on this framework. The service is now in closed beta, exclusively available to members of the international OpenDoc Society on http://www.officeshots.org (1). If you wish to join the beta program you can become a member or sponsor of the OpenDoc Society (2).

Officeshots.org was first announced on January 29th 2009, with the beta phase of the Officeshots.org service scheduled to become active at the end of February or early March. A delay in supporting rendering factories caused the original schedule to slip but with support of NLnet, Open IT Netherlands and Abicollab.net the project is finally ready to start the beta phase.

Project Lead Sander Marechal (The Lone Wolves Foundation): "At the start of the beta phase, Officeshots.org is running a number of factories implementing GO-OO, OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric and AbiWord. We expect to quickly add support for a number of other factories such as Lotus Symphony, RedOffice (Chinese), OfficeReader (an ODF viewer for Symbian smart phones) and the soon to be released KOffice 2.0" Software vendors and user communities are encouraged to add their office solution of choice to Officeshots.org, to make its functionality available to a wider audience.

So far development work within the project has concentrated on making a safe, distributed document rendering environment that allows buyers and developers to test interoperability in many different applications on many different platforms. During the closed beta the visual appearance of the main Officeshots website will be enhanced, and a translation framework so people can assist in translating Officeshots.org to their native language. The beta phase is expected to last until the beginning of June, after which the service will be available freely to anyone.

Officeshots will be put to the test significantly in the first ODF Plugfest that will be held June 15/16th 2009 in The Royal Library in The Hague, where a large number of ODF implementations (including wellknown names such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and Sun, but also upcoming players like ZCubes and CelFrame Office) will test their interoperability on invitation by the Dutch cabinet in the person of Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade Frank Heemskerk (3).

If you wish to be updated with the latest developments and get the announcement for the public release, please consider joining out mailinglist at the following URL:

http://lists.opendocsociety.org/mailman/listinfo/officeshots

1. If you want to log in with a digital certificate you can do so at https://www.officeshots.org.
2. Join at http://www.opendocsociety.org.
3. http://www.odfworkshop.nl.