The LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan on Wednesday, 25th September, the blog of The Document Foundation reminds us. The opening session will be held in the historic Cà Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science.

The conference is being sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ed.) and open source consultancy Collabora, whilst Google and CloudOn will be sponsoring the live ‘hackatons’ happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening and open source consultancy Lanedo sponsoring the food for the conference breaks.

The conference will close on Friday, 27th September with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can question The Document Foundation’s board of directors.

The conference tracks will cover the following:

• Open Document Format (ODF);
• LibreOffice Development;
• Community Development;
• Best Practice for Deployments and Migrations; and
• Building a Business with LibreOffice.

For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.

“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations at regional and local level,” says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation’s board of directors and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.

Conference sessions will be broadcast online, as well as being recorded and made available on the conference website.

At the end of last week, The Document Foundation blog announced the call for papers for the 2013 LibreOffice Conference, which will be held from 25th to 27th September at the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University in Italy.

The Document Foundation is inviting members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers and wants to hear from people, whether they are seasoned presenter or just have something interesting to share about LibreOffice.

The Call for Papers page is available at: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2013/en/call-for-papers.

Proposals should be submitted by 4th August 2013 to guarantee their consideration for inclusion in the conference programme. Detailed instructions on how to file proposals are available at: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2012/archive/support-information. These instructions should be followed carefully.

The conference programme will be based on the following tracks:

• Open Document Format (ODF);
• Interoperability;
• LibreOffice – Development and the future: Technology, API, Extensions;
• Community Track: Localisation, Documentation, etc.;
• Best Practice and Migration: Certification and Support;
• Migrating to LibreOffice in governments and enterprises;
• Building a successful business around LibreOffice.

Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth and be 30-45 minutes long (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 20 minutes (including Q&A). Workshops and panels will last longer (but should not exceed 90 minutes) and will discuss a topic or an issue. Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice suite, has announced that chip maker AMD is now a member of its Advisory Board. AMD is a leading designer and integrator of pioneering technologies that are at the heart of the digital devices people use every day, pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

“It is great to work on LibreOffice with The Document Foundation to expose the raw power of AMD GPUs and APUs, initially to spreadsheet users,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice-president, Heterogeneous Solutions at AMD. “Bringing the parallelism and performance of our technology to traditional, mainstream business software users will be a welcome innovation for heavy duty spreadsheet users, particularly when combined with the compute capabilities of the upcoming generation of AMD Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) based products.”

“It is exciting to work together with AMD and their ecosystem to take advantage of AMD’s cutting edge innovation right inside LibreOffice,” said Michael Meeks, SUSE Distinguished Engineer and TDF Board Member, “The growth in performance and parallelism available in the GPUs of today, and particularly with AMD’s revolutionary APUs of tomorrow, is something we’re eager to expose to LibreOffice users.”

With the addition of AMD, The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board now consists of eleven members: AMD, Google, RedHat, SUSE, Intel, Lanedo, the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST), the Inter-Ministry Mutalisation for an Open Productivity Suite (MIMO) from France, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Software in the Public Interest, and Germany’ Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

The first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.1, the free and open source office productivity suite, has been released, according to The H Online.

LibreOffice’s developers have released the RC1 version with release notes listing 61 bugs that have been fixed since the version’s Beta 2 publication a fortnight ago.

This is the first of 3 release candidates scheduled between now and 22 July when the final release of LibreOffice 4.1 should take place.

Due to the integration of libmwaw, LibreOffice 4.1 will also be able to handle legacy Mac formats from pre-Mac OS X applications such as Microsoft Word for Mac 5.1, Write Now 4.0, MacWrite Pro 1.5 and AppleWorks 6.0.

LibreOffice 4.1.0 RC1 is available from the LibreOffice pre-releases downloads page. As with all pre-release builds, the developers do not recommend LibreOffice 4.1.0 RC1 for “mission critical” tasks.

With the migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, public sector organisations in Italy’s mostly German-speaking South Tyrol region are making their first major steps towards using freien software. Over the coming 3 years, will convert 7,000 PC workstations and thus save some €600,000 in licensing fees.

Free software gained entry to Italian public sector organisations just under 20 years ago, but has so far only gained a niche presence. This has now come to an end as all public sector organisations in the South Tyrol shall in future be using the LibreOffice instead of Microsoft’s proprietary paid-for office suite. Over the next 3 years the regional government alone will be converting 7,000 computer workstations to the free software package, in addition to which several thousand more workstations in municipalities and the health sector will also be migrated.

“With the introduction of free software for standard applications, this of course means saving for us, but not just that by a long way: free software also makes us more flexible and flexibility is of major importance in a quickly changing field such as IT”, says Alderman Roberto Bizzo, the member of the regional assembly with responsibility for IT, on the philosophy associated with the change to free software.

Bizzo, Kurt Pöhl, head of the regional government’s IT department, free software expert Patrick Ohnewein of TIS and trade unionist Erwin Pfeifer gave a presentation yesterday the public sector’s new software strategy.

A working group was established in February in which TIS’ experts – in concert with the regional government, municipalities and the health sector – sounded out how free software could be used in all public sector organisations. The result of the consultations is the gradual introduction of free software, starting with LibreOffice. The ODF format has also been defined as the standard public sector document exchange format.

Read the original press release in German or Italian.