Re: redifining GNOME office.

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 22:08 +0300, Quim Gil wrote:
> Why don't we do the opposite: close officially GNOME Office and keep
> working on the interoperability and integration between GNOME
> applications.

I think we're in rough agreement; whether or not there is an official
"GNOME Office", we're saying that there ought to be a broad idea of how
office-type tools can work together in GNOME rather than a narrow idea
of a single suite with a single set of applications.

What users probably care more about is that their applications can read
their files (so, I think OpenDocument is important, though users might
not realise that), and that basic stuff that Ken mentioned works:
open/save dialogs are all consistent, printing is consistent, and the UI
fits with GNOME.

But I think we also need to keep sight of the fact that office-type apps
are very important to many users, especially those using GNOME for work.
They are the main day-to-day productivity tools, and I think GNOME could
do a lot better job integrating them. From a marketing point of view, I
think we would lose an important constituency (those making purchasing
decisions, etc.) if we didn't highlight GNOME as being excellent for
Office tasks: whether or not that means having a GNOME Office, I'm not
sure, but I wouldn't want to lose that concept completely.

Things like being able to link e-mails from Evo into tomboy are just
scratching the surface, we should be able to link all our data in there
if we like (e.g., having a note for a project, and links to relevant
e-mails, documents, etc.). GNOME's role in that kind of desktop is one
primarily of ensuring apps talk to each other and work in concert, IMHO.
I think we can still communicate something meaningful at that level
which primarily applies to productivity apps.

Cheers,

Alex.