[Officeshots] Officeshots public beta is open

[Michiel Leenaars]

Dear all,

on behalf of the project team we are happy to announce that as of right now 
everyone is welcome to start using the beta of Officeshots.org, an online 
webservice that makes it possible to compare the output quality of various 
office suites (including those that are not out in the wild) without any bias. 
Earlier on we had already opened up the service to limited groups of invited 
experts such as the participants of the first ODF plugfest. From today onwards 
everyone can register. 

Thanks to the hard work of many vendors, translators, OpenIT.nl (for hosting), 
our hardware sponsors Nokia and Sun Microsystems, designer Nuno Pinheiro and 
of course our project lead Sander Marechal we are finally ready for more 
people to come and use the application. It's open source, so if you miss 
anything feel free to help yourself by submitting code. We are working on 
adding additional services on top of the current framework to fully utilise 
the programmability of Officeshots.org and the aplications behind it - such as 
adding different validators, a greeking service (contributed by David Ibáñez 
from Itaapy) and daisychaining. And of course everyone is invited to add more 
office suites and other types of applications - it's easy. 

We will make a more formal announcement towards the press next week on behalf 
of OpenDoc Society and the Netherlands in Open Connection government 
programme, but for those of you who have been eagerly waiting to use 
Officeshots.org: come and try it out. Officeshots.org is still work in 
progress, and we are likely to run into new issues because of the upscaling to 
the public beta. Please don't be shy in letting us know what your experiences 
are.

On behalf of the project team,
Michiel Leenaars
OpenDoc Society
NLnet foundation