[Plugtest-org] Your comments please

[Michiel Leenaars]

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have the pleasure to invite you to participate in the second ODF plugfest, a 
two day ODF Interoperability Workshop which will take place in the Italian 
city of Orvieto on November 2nd and 3rd 2009 at Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio 
di Orvieto. This important event is organised by OpenDoc Society together with 
a number of other stakeholders including the OASIS ODF TC, ODF 
OIC TC, ODF Adoption TC and the Netherlands government (through the 
Netherlands in Open Connection Program) . 

The workshop is the second in a series of events that brings together 
implementors of OASIS OpenDocument Format/ISO 26300, after the first plugfest 
which was held in The Hague in June this year - which was visited by over 
sixtyfive participants from forty different companies, open source projects 
and governments. 

In addition to the regular interoperability testing activities, we have some 
very interesting sessions for you as can be seen in the attached preliminary 
program.  We are most excited to have Doug Mahugh from Microsoft Corporation 
presenting for the first time the mapping of his companies legacy binary 
Office file formats to ODF, which we consider to be a another major step 
towards interoperability across time and products. Although ODF has become the 
default format in many applications these days, one of the key issues when 
working with document standards is how to deal with going back and forth 
reliably between ODF and legacy formats from various applications. Doug will 
talk about the internal mappings as used by Microsoft and will go into detail 
what challenges their engineers have had in natively implementing ODF in their 
flagship products Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. We hope other vendors will 
follow suit and release other relevant mappings of legacy file formats - both 
for review and for implementing.

Of course the Orvieto plugfest will again provide plenty of opportunity to 
multilaterally test and discuss implementation issues of ODF with other 
application developers. We have already seen major progress in 
interoperability between participating applications since the previous 
plugfest. The aim is to provide a low-level hands-on interoperability testing 
environment in which vendors and community members can fine tune the 
interoperability capabilities of their ODF implementations and make test 
scenario's, recommendations and create best practises for implementors. The 
ultimate goal is to achieve full seamless interoperability for the entire 
feature set(s) of ODF across all suppliers, platforms and supported 
technologies. 

We hope that you will send a delegation as well to participate. With many of 
the teams behind the competing productivity tools on the market attending with 
their lead developers, technical management and/or their community leaders, 
this will hopefully be another important milestone. There is no fee required 
to participate, thanks to generous sponsorship from Fondazione Cassa di 
Risparmio di Orvieto and NLnet foundation. The plugfest is meant for those 
people within your company or team that write and architect the code to handle 
the actual ODF. Would you be so kind as to inform us if you or a 
representative from your company plans to attend this event or not? 

If you have any questions, need assistance or just need more details, we will 
gladly help you out. Please contact Fabrice Mous (fabrice.mous at 
opendocsociety.org) or Michiel Leenaars (michiel.leenaars at
opendocsociety.org), or one of the other members of the organising committee 
(*). At your request we can send you a letter to assist with any visa 
applications. Meanwhile, you can already go to the plugfest website 
(http://plugtest.opendocsociety.org) to look at the results of the previous 
plugfest as well as the preliminary plans for the next one. We hope to see you 
in Orvieto.

Kind regards,
on behalf of OpenDoc Society

Bert Bakker
President 


------------
(*) The organising committee for the second ODF plugfest consists of:

Jeremy Allison (Google) 
Peter Amstein (Microsoft)
Zaheda Bhorat (Google)
Pim Bliek (Netherlands in Open Connection)
Basil Cousins (Open Forum Europe)
Roberto Galoppini (OpenOffice.org)
Dennis Hamilton
Bart Hanssens (Fedict) - chair ODF OIC TC
Don  Harbison (IBM) - chair ODF Adoption TC
Peter Junge (Red Office) 
Morten Kjaersgaard (OSL)
Michiel Leenaars (Opendoc Society)
Doug Mahugh (Microsoft)
Marino Marcich (ODF alliance)
Fabrice Mous (OpenDoc Society)
Sachiko Muto (Open Forum Europe)
Andrew Rist (Oracle)
Luis Suarez-Potts (SUN Microsystems) 
Graham Taylor (Open Forum Europe)
Rob Weir (IBM) - chair ODF TC
Jan Wildeboer (Redhat) 
Oliver-Rainer Wittmann (SUN Microsystems)

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