Re: Gnome Office summary from the Gnome Summit.

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-07-25 at 02:57, Martin Sevior wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 	   Here are my notes fromt the Gnome Office session of the Gnome
> summit in plain text form. Since many of the people involved in these
> projects could not make it to the summit I thought it was important
> to write everything up. I think the the number one thing Gnome Office
> needs right now is a person committed to working and advocating
> integration between the various projects.
> 
> Now that the Gnome 2 platform has been delivered maybe some people who
> have been concentrating on "platform issues" might like to look at these
> "integration issues". We came up with many ideas of how we can do better
> than the competition by integrating these large applications right into
> the desktop environment.

Though I am very supportive of gnumeric and abiword, and should say up
front that I was, regrettably, unable to attend the GNOME-Office talk
due to a schedule conflict, I am a bit sorry to see almost no mention of
OpenOffice.org in these minutes.

OO.o is at the moment the biggest single free-software office suite
available, and arguably the most complete; as such it is very relevant
to the goal of a "top notch office productivity package" integrated in
to the GNOME desktop.  

Of course there have been grumblings about the non-gtk-centered toolkit
in OO.o, but that's partly legacy and partly a response to the need for
a cross-platform solution (though of gtk+ is available on Win32 now). 
But certainly choice is good, and I hope that whatever
integration/interop work takes place for GNOME Office continues to
target OOo as a key component.  Certainly OOo itself is making progress
towards better GNOME integration with things like its theming and
upcoming accessibility support.

regards,

-Bill

> Cheers
> 
> Martin Sevior
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> Notes from the discussion at the GNOME Office Workshop.
> 
> In the IRC discussion we had a goal to make a substantial coordinated
> release of GNOME-Office by December. We want these application to be
> ported to GTK2/GNOME2 by then.Is this still realistic?
> 
> 
> By years end Evolution/AbiWord/Gnumeric will be serious competition for
> MS Office in features, be at least as nice to use, and of course be fully
> integrated into the GNOME environment.
> 
> 
> It is worth noting that the creation and integration of a top notch
> Office Productivity package into a Linux desktop is a really, really
> serious deal for MicroSoft. They simply cannot afford to give away their
> Office Productivity suite - it generates at least 40% of their revenue.
> At the same time a MS based corporate desktop costs businesses around
> $1000 per seat. Our success will substantially lower costs for businesses
> integrated into the GNOME environment.
> 
> 
> It is worth noting that the creation and integration of a top notch
> Office Productivity package into a Linux desktop is a really, really
> serious deal for MicroSoft. They simply cannot afford to give away their
> Office Productivity suite - it generates at least 40% of their revenue.
> At the same time a MS based corporate desktop costs businesses around
> $1000 per seat. Our success will substantially lower costs for businesses
> and provide a compelling case for a change.
> 
> 
> _Status of GNOME-Office Applications_
> 
> _Evolution _
> 
> New features planned for a November release followed by a GTK2/GNOME2
> port next year.
> 
> 
> _AbiWord _
> 
> New features: Tables, Footnotes, EndNotes, Revision Marks, Auto Font
> configuration/detection, Anti-aliasing, Hidden text, Document properties,
> Import/Export filter improvements, Bonobo container for embeddable
> objects. Gtk 2/Gnome port, Maybe "plumbing plugin" to do useful things
> with interesting text strings (UPS slips, email addresses, Instant
> messenger addresses). - beta in a couple of months, Stable release by
> December.
> 
> _Gnumeric _
> 
>         Embeddable bonobo object, GTK2/Gnome 2 port. Stable release by
> December.
> 
> _MrProject _
> 
>         ??
> 
> _GAIM_
> 
> Separate library backend from Front End. Make it usable from any apps
> that want Instant Messenger - maybe via a "pumbing" style infrastructure.
> 
> _Agnubis_
> 
>         ??
> 
> _Gnome-db_
> 
> ??
> 
> _Guppi_
> 
> ??
> 
> _GtkMathView_
> 
> ??
> 
> _GIMP_
> 
> ??
> 
> _Dia_
> 
> ??
> 
> _Sodipodi_
> 
>         ??
> 
> 
> 
> All the Gnome Office applications are large programs. We all have lots of
> work to do to make our own applications as good as they can be. However
> we also realize that each project gains from using features from other
> projects. We also all gain from a common look and feel from an integrated
> look among our projects. So we want to find ways to integrate these
> projects to make them easily usable and develop synergy between them.
> 
> The classic example is embedding components such as AbiWord in Evolution
> to read Word Processing documents or Guppi in Gnumeric to display charts.
> Certainly we need to continue this.
> 
> Apart from anything else these helps in "Marketing" . Users now expect
> Office Suites to have these integrated features.
> 
> 
> Some suggestions for integration.
> 
> * Have a gnome-office panel?shell? to launch these applications.
> 
> * Copy and paste (maintaining formatting) easily from application to
>   application. (Concensus was to use (X)Html to X clipboard?)
> 
> * Some wizards to whip up useful applications from users.
>   (eg Form letters, envolope printing)
> 
> * Extract data from Gnome-db/ addressbook/gnumeric/calendar to generate
>   letters.
> 
> * Extract emails from evolution to write documents.
> 
> * Embed Guppi plots in gnumeric/AbiWord
> 
> * Embed spreadsheets in AbiWord
> 
> * Use AbiWord to generate reports for MrProject
> 
> * Use AbiWord to generate reports form gnome-db
> 
> * Use the interesting "Plumbing" technology to do useful things from
>   arbitrary text strings. eg Click on Hyperlinks, UPS address slips,
>   email addresses, instant messenger addresses, file names
> 
> * Integration with Galeon/Nautilus - display Office (MS documents, OO,
>   WP, *) in the web browser/ Nautilus.
> 
> * Integration with Nautilus - display contents of MS word/ Word
>   Perfect/SO/OO/HTML/(everything else) documents inside Icons as is
>   currently done with text docs. We could do this rather easily with
>   AbiWord and would be a genuinely new feature on the desktop.
> 
> * Other ideas?
> 
> What I'd like is for people to work on is integration between these big
> applications. The people who work on these big office apps normally have
> their hands full making their own applications work. There is a big
> learning curve for new hackers on these big applications. On the other
> hand new hackers can make very useful contributions on the glue code
> between these apps and in particular a plumbing style architecture.
> 
> 
> _Some Action Items._
> 
> * Gnome-Office really needs someone to lead these integration issues and
>   try to herd cats into useful activities. This person would promote the
>   usefulness of working on Gnome Office applications (maybe particular
>   integration projects).
> 
> * X clipboard format (use (X)html to copy and paste between applications?
> 
> * Advocacy for Gnome Office integration projects on gnome-love.
> 
> * Work towards cohert dialogs - Gnome 2 UI guidelines.
> 
> * Look through the UI guidelines to evaluate our interfaces.
> 
> * Menu label/orders
> 
> * Glue code/wizards
> 
> * Get interfaces to data items doing useful things (especially now
>   AbiWord has tables)
> 
> * Implement libgsf for Gnome Office apps.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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