[Officeshots] Officeshots.org status update

[Sander Marechal]

Hello everyone and welcome to the Officeshots.org mailinglist

My name is Sander Marechal. I am from the Lone Wolves Foundation [1] and
I am the lead architect of Officeshots.org. Thank you all for showing an
interest in the Officeshots.org project.

[1] http://www.jejik.com

URLs
~~~~
These are all the currently active URLs of the project

* http://www.officeshots.org
  A simple page with a description of the project. This will host
  the public version of Officeshots in the future.

* http://dev.officeshots.org
* https://dev.officeshots.org
  The development version of the central server. If you have an account
  on the server you can use the SSL protected version and log in
  with your SSL client certificate. Of course, the e-mail address on
  your certificate needs to match the e-mail address on your account.
  More on this below.

* http://docs.officeshots.org
  Contains the documentation of the project. It is automatically
  generated from the Subversion repository on each commit.

* http://bugzilla.jejik.com
* http://bugs.officeshots.org
  This is the bugzilla for all of Lone Wolves' projects. At the moment
  only bugzilla.jejik.com is available but within an hour or so you
  should be able to use bugs.officeshots.org

* https://svn.jejik.com/officeshots
  This is the Subversion repository for Officeshots. In the future this
  will move to https://code.officeshots.org

* http://svn.jejik.com
  The web interface (ViewVC) for the Subversion repository

* http://lists.opendocsociety.org/mailman/listinfo/officeshots
  The mailinglist, but you already found that :-)

Current status
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At the moment both the server and the factory clients are under heavy
development in order to get everything ready for the beta phase at the
end of this month.

What works:
* The server XML-RPC API on the development server.
* User registration and management on the development server. You should
  be able to create and activate an account on the development server.
* The base factory client running OpenOffice.org in headless mode.

What does not work:
* Everything else on the development server.

The entire UI of the server is under heavy development and most things
do not work yet. Most of the pages on there are just standard
scaffolding generated by CakePHP (which is the framework that the server
is built on). Please, do not try to submit any conversion requests to
the server yet. When the UI is far enough along to accept files I will
announce it on this mailinglist.

About the development server
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The development server has a few quirks. It runs multiple website that
all need SSL certificates so I am using Apache mod_gnutls instead of
mod_ssl. That means two things:

1) You need a client that supports Server Name Indication [2] if you
   want to connect to the SSL protected server. Almost all browsers
   and XML-RPC clients support SNI these days. The notable exception
   is Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP (Vista should work). So,
   if you want to authenticate yourself using your client certificate
   and you are on Windows XP then use something else than IE.

2) There's a bug in mod_gnutls [3] that prevents me from loading
   all of the common CA certificates at once. There is a patch out
   but that has not made it into Debian yet (which is what the
   development server runs). At the moment the development server
   will only accept client certificates signed by CACert [4]. If you do
   not have such a certificate then CACert can provide you with one at
   no cost.

None of these issues apply to the main server that will be running the
beta and public versions of Officeshots.org. These will use mod_ssl
instead of mod_gnutls.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=511573
[4] http://www.cacert.org/

Current work
~~~~~~~~~~~~
* I am busy getting the UI far enough along to accept file conversion
  requests and view the results.
* Maximilian Odendahl is building a Factory that supports OfficeReader
  on Symbian smartphones.

How you can help
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Most importantly, we need factories. If you can program in Python then
you can help by creating new Factory backends to support different
office suites [5][6][7]. At the moment only OpenOffice.org in headless
mode is supported. We need backends for every office application and
reader that supports ODF. If you know something about VNC as well then
you can port the VNC part of the browsershots.org factory to the
officeshots.org factory so we can attept to support web-based office
applications like Google Docs and Zoho as well (not to mention run
regular office suites in VNC and take screenshots).

[5] http://docs.officeshots.org/factory-guide/factory.html
[6] http://docs.officeshots.org/factory/
[7] http://dev.officeshots.org/xmlrpc

When the UI is far enough along to accept files then we will also need
people who are willing to run factories. This should require no
technical knowledge aside from installing a few applications and edeting
some configuration files.

Windows Python people. I am a Linux guy. I don't even have access to a
Windows machine and I really don't feel like going through the hassle of
installing IronPython on Wine if I can avoid it. The base factory should
in theory run under Windows but I would appreciate it of someone can try
this out and fix any problems. Bonus points if you know how to make
OpenOffice.org run headless on Windows.

If any of you knows a bit of graphics design then I would love some
help. Officeshots.org needs a good logo, and if you have any ideas about
how the website should look like then that would be appreciated as well.
I can do web design myself but it's not my greatest strength. I'm more
of a web developer than a web designer.

After the beta has started we will also need translators. CakePHP has a
complete i18n and l10n system built in that we want to use to make the
central server multi-lingual. We have had a few offers already (hat-tip
to ODF-Discuss) but more will certainly be welcome.

Roadmap
~~~~~~~
Closed beta for members of the OpenDoc Society and contributors is
planned for the end of this month, beginning of next month.

The public beta will being roughly one month after the closed beta.

Thanks
~~~~~~
A big thanks to the NLnet Foundation, The OpenDoc Society and NoiV.

Kind regards,

-- 
Sander Marechal
Lone Wolves Foundation
http://www.jejik.com