Minutes of Marketing Call - June 14, 2017
Attendees: Uwe Altmann, Jona Azizaj (partial), Florian Effenberger
(partial), Sophie Gautier, Marina Latini, Anxhelo Lushka (partial), Mike
Saunders, Martin Srebotniak, Heiko Tietze, Italo Vignoli, Franklin Weng
Agenda
1. Announcement of LibreOffice 5.4
Announcement of LibreOffice 5.4 is scheduled for the last week of July
(potential date: Wednesday, July 26). We have started collecting
information, and while Mike will be working at the new features video,
Italo will be drafting documents for the announcement: press release,
background on new features, white paper about cost of interoperability
(based on interesting findings from the National Institute of Standards
and Technologies of the US Government), white paper about ODF vs OOXML,
and possibly a video about ODF vs OOXML. Materials will be ready in
early July.
2. LibreOffice 6.0: why the change of numbering
After LibreOffice 5.4, we will change development cycle, as we will
launch the LibreOffice 6 family (starting from LibreOffice 6.0 in late
January 2018). The Design Team has started to work on a new branding
concept for LibreOffice 6.0, and we will probably launch a mascot
competition (which is going to be discussed during the next BoD
meeting). Rationale for the change of development cycle will be
discussed at the LibreOffice Conference in Rome.
3. Status of update of TDF slide decks
Italo has just managed a Migration to LibreOffice Workshop in Tirana,
and he has updated most of the shared TDF slide decks. He will upload
the updated slide decks on the wiki during the weekend, including the
first release of the ODF vs OOXML slide deck, which will be finalized in
early August (just before the workshop in Taiwan). During the next few
months, Italo will try to organize a number of webinars or seminars to
bring everyone up to speed on the topic (which is not trivial,
especially if we want to communicate with "normal" end users, who
represent the majority of LibreOffice users also in enterprises).
Questions
- LibreOffice conference and the ODF Plugfest
The technical session of the ODF PlugFest in Rome will be organized on
Tuesday, October 10, the day before the opening session of the
LibreOffice Conference. The presentation session will be organized in
the afternoon of Wednesday, October 11, at the end of the opening
session of the conference.
- Questions about Italy Defence project
The Italian Ministry of Defence has migrated 35,000 desktop out of
100,000. During the process, L2 and L3 support has been provided by the
internal structure of the organization, which is providing the same kind
of services for several applications (as most contents exchanged inside
the organization cannot be shared with any external structure, because
of the peculiar nature of the Ministry of Defence).
- Further updates of the status of UK and Munich City
We do not have any specific updates on the progress made in UK about the
switch to ODF. For sure, the UK government has now other priorities than
in 2014, because of the Brexit discussions with the EU. On the contrary,
the fact that the city of Munich is switching back to MS Windows and MS
Office seems just a matter of time. Unfortunately, the entire FLOSS
ecosystem has managed the situation in the wrong way, as it has
overlooked the importance of communicating the advantages of the switch
to OSS on a daily basis (even when you have a strong political sponsor).
For sure, the city of Munich has been functioning for 12 years - without
any major hiccup - with a FLOSS based infrastructure, which represents
in any case a testament of the viability of FLOSS for large public
administrations. Also, to switch back to MS Windows and MS Office the
city of Munich will spend almost 100 million dollars during the next few
years, with an estimated increase of 75 million dollars over the current
FLOSS infrastructure. This figure does not include hidden security costs
based on the higher vulnerability of MS Windows based systems, as
demonstrated by the recent WannaCry attacks (which have not affected
MacOS and Linux systems).
- Akademy booth
TDF booth at KDE Akademy will be staffed by Gabriele Ponzo and possibly
Xisco Faulì. Italo will put in touch the different people attending the
event.