Q: What are the main features of the upcoming OpenOffice.org release?

A: With OpenOffice.org and StarOffice 8 we, and with we I mean Sun's OpenOffice.org/StarOffice engineering, mainly focused on improving the Microsoft interoperability and compatibility. That is, for example if you look at an application like Impress, the presentation tool, there we now have very similar user interface. It has this multipane view where you can scroll through the slides, on the left side and assign animation effects and everything on the right side, so that application looks very similar to the PowerPoint. Impress now supports auto-shapes that are available in PowerPoint, slide transitions and animation effects so now we can really import PowerPoint files without any loss. That is a huge step. 

In Writer, the Word equivalent, we are now also supporting this "format paintbrush", which allows to copy and paste formatting information from one area to another area, which was one feature that has been requested by many users. 

In Calc we now also support documents with more than 32 thousand rows and we implemented a lot of improvements in regard of "pivot tables" which are called "data pilot" in Calc. 

Another important area is PDF export, which has been drastically improved, so now we support things like thumbnails, bookmarks, table of content, even form elements get correctly exported with the PDF export. 

And we also introduce XForms support for XML forms within OO.org and StarOffice. And the most important thing, although not the most visible to some users is that we now support OASIS OpenDocument format, which is open standard file format. It's XML based and was standardized by open process and open standards body which includes members from Sun Microsystems, IBM and now also Adobe, for example, and people from open source community and KOffice project are also members. 

Q: So in the future if I ask someone in which file format they want their files, they will just answer to me  OpenDocument? 

A: With OpenOffice and StarOffice you have a choice of different file formats, so the standard default file format that we are using in OO.org and StarOffice is OASIS OpenDocument file format. But, as before, both provide support for all Microsoft file formats and WordPerfect and other file formats that people might want to use. 

Q: With the new UI in OpenOffice.org and StarOffice 8, are you afraid of criticism that you copied too much of Microsoft Office or do you think you've managed to add enough of your own features and improvements on their look? 

A: We have been doing usability studies for the development of OpenOffice.org 2.0 and StarOffice 8, so in areas we realized we have to change something, because the usability is not good enough, we made those changes and in some cases that meant that we, more or less, copied the way Microsoft Office is doing it. In other areas we maintained the old way or did something different, based on usability studies. So it's not that we necessarily just copied what Microsoft Office is doing. Overall I think we didn't copied too much, but we did what most users requested and usability study shows that this is a huge improvement over the previous status. Although, some long time OpenOffice or StarOffice users might be surprised by the changes, but I think overall the usability has improved drastically. 

Q: How do you know which features are the most requested, what are the users wanting? How do you do your usability studies? Are these just reports or do you go out in the "field"? On which groups are you focusing? 

A: Feature requests are coming form different resources, via requests for enhancements submitted by community members and users via open source tools like issue tracker, which are part of OpenOffice.org website. Another source is Sun customer or StarOffice customer base, surveys that we do for both OpenOffice and StarOffice are another source of features requests. With respect of usability studies we are working with professional agencies to do those usability studies, so we get users that have been using Microsoft Office before or have never used any office suite before and let them play with OpenOffice and StarOffice and see how they are using the office suite, how they are solving different problems that we give them. 

Q: What are the main differences between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice? 

A: The main differences for users/consumers are things like commercial spell checker that we bundle, clip art graphics and fonts, which are important for Microsoft compatibility, especially on non-Microsoft platforms. For enterprises and governments who have larger deployments of MS Office, for example, we provide two kinds of migration tools. One is Document Analysis Wizard, which allows to analyze and/or aces the current situation, so you can analyze documents that are stored in different directories and check how many Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents you have, how old they are, if they are still relevant or not, if they include macros, maybe any issues that we already know of and cannot be easily migrated. So, this document analysis is a report that helps you with the estimates of the effort and the costs of migration. Then we also provide the Macro Migration Tool, which allows converting existing VBA macros over to StarOffice API. And with that tool our approach is to cover the most frequently used APIs, not every single API that might be out there, but at least most important ones. And we do that based on documents that we get from customers or directly via migration partners. 

Q: Does it convert to a Python scripting version of macros or Basic ones? 

A: Mostly to the Basic macros, but in some areas we also need some special API, which is some kind of compatibility layer, which we ship with StarOffice. These migration tools are StarOffice specific. One other tool that only comes with StarOffice is so-called "Java Subsystem Configuration Manager", which allows to manage all the user configuration information, like if users can execute macros or not, or were users get their document templates form, where they store their documents, what default file format they should be using. All these configuration information or data can be managed via centralized web-based interface.