Today many people have digital content they created years ago and stored in obsolete and proprietary document formats. Very often these old file formats cannot be opened by any application on the user’s current operating system, leaving the users locked out of their own content.

However, it is not just individuals that are affected: public and private sector organisations are similarly afflicted; and this can have huge consequences when, say, a a government is unable to read or access digital data it has created in the past.

This is where The Document Liberation Project comes into its own.

The Document Liberation Project was created to enable, people, private and public sector organisations to recover their data from proprietary formats and to provide a means of converting the recovered data into open and standardised file formats, such as Open Document Format, thus returning effective control over the content to the actual authors from the software computer that devised the proprietary formats.

To achieve this, The Document Liberation Project develops software libraries that applications can use to read data in proprietary formats.

The following video explains how this process works.

Read more about The Document Liberation Project and the list of projects it supports.

Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite in the cloud, has announced the release the first production grade version of Collabora Online, its flagship cloud document suite solution. Codenamed “Engine”, it is targeted specifically at hosting and cloud businesses who wish to support both commercial and consumer document viewing, creation and editing services in their portfolios.

“Collabora Online 1.0 is the culmination of several years’ intensive work”, remarked Michael Meeks, Collabora Productivity’s General Manager. “Our objective is to enable key document suite service delivery for hosters by integrating seamlessly with their existing groupware, storage, file sharing and other customer solutions. Critically, Collabora will tailor the look and feel of the integration to complement a hoster’s identity and desired product experience.”

For this release Collabora Productivity has also updated its demo, which now includes, amongst other things:

• Header menus;
• Right click menus;
• Tables
• Comments

Interested potential users can request access to the demo from Collabora.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the availability LibreOffice 5.0.6 “still”, the sixth release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, which can be used for the deployment in large organisations and for more conservative software users.

The Document Foundation recommends large-scale deployment of LibreOffice 5.0.6 with professional level 3 support from certified developers (a list of qualified developers is available at https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). When migrating to LibreOffice from proprietary office suites such as MS Office, organisations are further advised to seek professional support from certified migration consultants and trainers, which are listed on the same web page.

In addition, there are companies providing LibreOffice LTS (Long Term Support) versions with incremental updates which are targeted at enterprise deployments.

People interested in technical details about the release can see the bugs fixed in RC1) and those fixed in RC2.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.0.6 is available for immediate download.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation by making a donation. In addition, LibreOffice merchandise is now available from the brand new project shop.

LibreOffice Conference

The 2016 LibreOffice Conference will be hosted by the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic from 7th to 9th September. The conference is being organised by OpenAlt.

Details of the Call for Papers, which is open until 15th July 2016, are available at https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/04/08/libreoffice-brno-conference-call-for-paper/, whilst registration has also opened for the conference.

LibreOffice development versions

Pre-release development versions of LibreOffice are also available. To access these, visit the pre-releases server.

Finally, for those who want to right on the bleeding edge of software development, there are nightly builds available, although it should be pointed out that both pre-release and nightly build versions are intended for technology enthusiasts and developers only; use in a production environment by users with average IT skills is not recommended.

A blog post earlier this week from The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the popular free and open source office productivity suite, gives details of the first bug hunting session for the forthcoming release of LibreOffice 5.2.

There is also a page on the session on the LibreOffice wiki.

This initial session will be held on Friday, 22nd April 2016. Tests will be performed on the Alpha version of LibreOffice 5.2, which will be available on the pre-releases servers a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), MacOS and Windows.

Mentors will be available on on the day from 8.00 a.m. UTC to 10.00 p.m. UTC. Of course it will also be possible to hunt bugs on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 5.2.0 Alpha) will be available until the end of May.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the four main LibreOffice modules – Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw – between 3.00 p.m. UTC and 5.00 p.m. UTC; and the second to test the top 10 features between 5.00 p.m. UTC and 7.00 p.m. UTC. The list of the top 10 features will be decided during the week before the session and will be added to the wiki page.

Three days ago, The Document Foundation (TDF) announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1.1, the latest release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family.

LibreOffice 5.1.1 offers a long awaited feature in Writer – the first request for which dates back to 2002 – as it allows hiding the white space between pages to provide a continuous flow of text. This feature will be extremely useful on laptops.

LibreOffice 5.1.1 is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests the “still” version: LibreOffice 5.0.5. For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation recommends engaging certified professional support.

People interested in technical details about the release can see the bugs fixed in Release Candidate 1 and RC3. There was no intervening RC2.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.1.1 is immediately available for download.

Besides the “fresh” and “still” versions of LibreOffice, those who want to be at the bleeding edge or assist in development can also download development versions, nightly builds and the source code. Your correspondent is currently using a pre-release version, 5.1.3*.

Finally LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation.

* = When initially upgraded, the installation process reported data corruption in the Calc spreadsheet component. This was resolved by downloading the package again and re-installing the relevant spreadsheet packages.