'Apache OpenOffice in 2014: a year in review'

Category: blog

2014 has been an exciting year for the OpenOffice project and community.

Click on the picture below to start a slideshow with highlights from 2014. A text-only version is under the picture.


  • January: The Apache OpenOffice community starts the year by adding new localizations.
    OpenOffice supports 120+ languages, but only those that are 100% translated and maintained are officially released.The 100% complete localizations in 2014 doubled the ones from 2012.
    OpenOffice also participated, as usual, in the initiatives for UNESCO's International Mother Language Day in February.
  • February: OpenOffice comes back to FOSDEM, one of the most popular Free and Open Source Conferences in Europe, with a devroom and a dedicated stand.
    For the first year, the devroom is open to all ODF Editors.
  • March: the Apache OpenOffice community prepares for ApacheCon Denver (7-11 April) by designing a dedicated track.
    Selected topics include: work toward a new translation workflow and a new build system, Open Source marketing and security testing.
  • April: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.0 is released, with much improved accessibility, support for comments on text ranges, a new interface for editing input fields and many improvements in handling of graphics.
    Hundreds of community members participate in testing, with dedicated tests by accessibility experts.
    The code, distributed under the Apache License 2.0, is promptly reused by other projects.
  • May: Apache OpenOffice downloads hit the 100 million mark in less than 2 years.
    By the end of 2014, downloads are more than 130 millions, from virtually all countries and territories in the world.
  • June: A new initiative allows to quickly and easily localize the OpenOffice website. New translations like Lithuanian and Hebrew are published and updated.
    Website translations are made more visibile using a language dropdown and browser-based language negotiation.
  • July: The social media presence of Apache OpenOffice grows.
    The Facebook fan page at https://facebook.com/ApacheOO grows more than 30% from 2013, to 13,000 fans.
    The official Twitter account at https://twitter.com/apacheoo has more than 3,500 followers, with a 75% increase over the previous year.
  • August: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 is released, with several important bugfixes, full support for three additional languages, security improvements and support for gestures under Mac OS X.
  • September: The Apache OpenOffice Forum and Wiki receive hardware upgrades by the Apache Infra team to be able to sustain the ever-growing traffic.
    The official forum at https://forum.openoffice.org is the most used channel for user support, averaging over 100 posts per day and accumulating 320,000 posts about Apache OpenOffice and all derivatives.
  • October: A community survey is launched to understand how we can better exploit the potential of our several hundreds contributors. Results will set the priorities for community development in future.
    The user community continues to grow thanks to increased adoption, with Udine (Italy) joining the long list of public administrations that migrated to OpenOffice.
  • November: Apache OpenOffice has a strong presence at ApacheCon Europe, held in Budapest. A dedicated track is the occasion to reason about upcoming developments, our community, migration, integration with mobile technologies and web projects.
  • December: Thanks to the work of Apache Infra and investments from the Apache Foundation, Apache OpenOffice has technology available to sign its releases in a way compatible with Windows security settings, thus allowing also non-technical users to immediately verify that they downloaded the genuine version of OpenOffice and confirming the continued commitment from Apache and OpenOffice to protect users.
    The new digital signing will be available in the next OpenOffice releases.

Have a nice 2015!