KOfficeSource GmbH Offers Commercial Support for KOffice DATE: 2008-01-09 PRESS RELEASE KOfficeSource GmbH with main offices in Magdeburg, Germany, today starts its activity in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. KOfficeSource GmbH will offer professional services around the open source OpenDocument-based KOffice office suite[1]. KOfficeSource GmbH will allow KOffice to be used in companies and organizations that demand high quality support and training for OpenDocument deployment. The OpenDocument file format is the ISO standard document format for office applications[2]. OpenDocument is being mandated by more and more governments and organisations, among them the governments of the Netherlands, South Africa, and Norway. It is the only vendor neutral file format of this kind and has been designed by a mixture of vendors, user organizations, and library representatives. KOffice is an extensive and rich application suite including not only a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation application, but also a database, an illustration application, a raster image editor, a diagramming application, a mathematical formula editor, a charting component and a project planner. The KOffice developers have been working on the defining committee of OpenDocument since the beginning. KOffice was also the first office suite to natively support OpenDocument as its primary file format. KOffice 2.0 is expected for release in the first half of 2008 and will support Windows, Unix and Mac OS X. Services -------- KOfficeSource GmbH will initially offer the following services to the market: * Migration and conversion to OpenDocument Consulting regarding migration from proprietary and closed formats to open formats in general and OpenDocument in particular. * Consulting around the OpenDocument Format. The founders of KOfficeSource GmbH have extensive knowledge about the OpenDocument Format, both from a standardization point of view and technical implementation. * Training on OpenDocument and KOffice This includes both user training and developer training for developers interested in creating extensions and customizations of KOffice. * Customization of KOffice KOffice is the most flexible and customizable office suite in existence. KOffice makes it easy to create tools suitable for a certain line of business, such as tools for movie script writers, lawyers or school education. It is also easy to extend the functionality in any direction that an organization needs or integrate it with existing tools. * Custom programming KOfficeSource Gmbh has expertise on Qt, the toolkit developed by Trolltech [3] that is the basis of the Linux desktop KDE as well as the internals of KOffice. We can therefore quickly create new components that fit into the rest of the suite or new features of existing components. Founders -------- Most of the founders of KOfficeSource GmbH are well known in the KOffice community and have extensive experience of the business. * CEO: Tobias Hintze Tobias founded his first own company in 2000, focusing on maintenance for computer networks and some smaller software developing projects. Later, he founded "threllis GmbH" in 2006 as sole shareholder as an IT company selling services and equipment for IT infrastructures, including NOC-services like hosting and colocation. Tobias is also involved in the ROCK Linux project as a lead developer and has his technical expertise mainly in UNIX-systems, networking, and security. * CTO: Boudewijn Rempt Boudewijn has a MA in comparative linguistics from Leyden University in Holland. He founded Kura, an Open Source application for this field, currently maintained at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. His career in the IT industry has put him in positions as a developer, architect and project lead on such diverse projects as a mobile agent platform, traffic analysis and interactive computer graphics. Boudewijn is currently the release manager for KOffice and the maintainer of the Krita paint application within KOffice. Krita received the award for the best application at the KDE conference Akademy in Dublin 2006. * Sales & Marketing: Inge Wallin Inge has a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Linköping University in Sweden. He co-founded Cendio AB in 1992, a company which today is the oldest Open Source company in the world, at least as far as he knows. Inge worked as CEO for 9 years and is now a senior systems engineer. He is a member of the board of directors of Cendio AB and previously Ingate Systems AB, a leading vendor of firewalls. Inge has contributed to a large variety of open source projects. During the last few years, he has concentrated his efforts to KDE where he has been mainly active in the educational effort kdeedu and KOffice. He is currently the maintainer of KChart in KOffice, and has been functioning as the KOffice marketing coordinator since 2005. About KOffice ------------- KOffice is the most comprehensive office suite in the world, comprising no less than 11 components: Productivity Applications * KWord - A frame-based word processor that can work in two modes: page oriented or layout oriented * KSpread - A powerful spreadsheet application. * KPresenter - A full-featured presentation program. * Kexi - An integrated environment for creating databases and database applications. Creativity Applications * Kivio - A Visio®-style flowcharting application. * Karbon - A vector drawing application. * Krita - A layered pixel image manipulation application Management Application * KPlato - An integrated project management and planning tool. Supporting Applications * KChart - An integrated graph and chart drawing tool. * KFormula - A powerful math tool and formula editor. * Kugar - A tool for generating business quality reports. KOffice was the first office suite to embrace the OASIS OpenDocument Format that has now become an ISO standard, and the second to use it as the default format. KOffice builds on the Qt toolkit by Trolltech and technology from the award-winning KDE desktop environment[4], the most widely used Linux desktop. It is widely regarded as the most flexible and customizable office suite, making it perfect for custom solutions centered round the OpenDocument Format. Contact ------- For more information about KOfficeSource GmbH in Germany, contact: Tobias Hintze phone: +49 391 251915 50 KOfficeSource GmbH Schilfbreite 3 39120 Magdeburg Germany http://www.kofficesource.com/ More information ---------------- [1] KOffice: http://www.koffice.org/ [2] OpenDocument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument [3] Trolltech: http://www.trolltech.com [4] KDE: http://www.kde.org