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NeoOffice :: View topic - NeoOffice 3.0 EAP revised dates
NeoOffice 3.0 EAP revised dates
 
   NeoOffice Forum Index -> NeoOffice Development
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi


Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH

PostPosted: Sun May 18, 2008 2:53 pm    Post subject:

pluby wrote:
The problem we keep running into is that while many users would like to see NeoOffice replicate many MS Office workflow features like Word VBA support, End Note support, AppleScript support, non-linear Solver support, etc., our funding makes replicating such MS Office features infeasible. At the same time, we don't want to just limit NeoOffice features to whatever Sun Microsystems' OOo engineers deem to be adequate.


True, but much of this goes for OOo in general, so Sun can be expected to put in some effort.

Many Mac-specific features, on the other hand, are not interesting to Sun, and it is precisely there that you guys have been doing a stellar job.

Best wishes,
Oscar

_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Sun May 18, 2008 7:50 pm    Post subject:

rpatrick wrote:
This sounds very cool indeed! One question: I thought that server/bandwidth for this kind of thing was expensive? Mind I suppose most docs are much smaller than 1MB whereas a NeoOffice download is well over 100 so perhaps for something like this the costs would be very low?


Good question. Very Happy

Ed and I did a lot of research on this as not only will we need a good chunk of bandwidth above the existing 4 or 5 terabytes of bandwidth that we purchase each month, but we will also need lots of disk storage. Futhermore, we need to have reliable storage.

We did a lot of number crunching and what we found is that storing and serving the files using Amazon's S3 storage service is extremely well priced. What is really cool is that when you push a file into their server farm, the file is guaranteed to be stored in at least two different physical locations and your files will not be data mined. As an added bonus, they store all files securely so that NeoOffice Mobile users most go through our servers to retrieve a temporary redirect to Amazon S3's storage.

Since Amazon's highly reliable storage is far better and cheaper than what we or our webhosting provider can provide, we can focus on programming the account maintenance and NeoOffice GUI.

Lastly, to ensure that our large donors' donations don't get eaten up by bandwidth and storage costs, we plan on using the size of the donation to set bandwidth and storage limits. The idea is that if you use up a fixed percentage of your donation in bandwidth and storage fees and then, you can add more bandwidth and storage by doing another donation.

Patrick
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jakeOSX
Ninja
Ninja


Joined: Aug 12, 2003
Posts: 1373

PostPosted: Sun May 18, 2008 7:58 pm    Post subject:

forgive me for being the voice of dissent on this thread, both of you know my respect for your work.

i don't see this as being something you should be investing your time in. there are already projects looking to link oo.o with google docs, and there are already means of looking at documents on phones.

while it would be 'neat' to have an integrated neooffice solution, to what end? would it be a google docs goal? a paid service?

it sounds like it is out of scope of this project, something said a lot in these forums. i think the expectations of 'neooffice mobile' will be high, higher than a simple veiwer, only because you yourselves have already set the neooffice standard so high.

what would i rather have you spend time on? i don't know. you got neooffice/j to print and i was happy. this just feels off, like something i would start and then ... well, abandon Embarassed
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Sun May 18, 2008 8:47 pm    Post subject:

jakeOSX wrote:
while it would be 'neat' to have an integrated neooffice solution, to what end? would it be a google docs goal? a paid service?


jakeOSX wrote:
it sounds like it is out of scope of this project, something said a lot in these forums. i think the expectations of 'neooffice mobile' will be high, higher than a simple veiwer, only because you yourselves have already set the neooffice standard so high.

what would i rather have you spend time on? i don't know. you got neooffice/j to print and i was happy. this just feels off, like something i would start and then ... well, abandon Embarassed


Here is the crux of the scope issue: scope of set by the following two things:

1. How much Ed and I can afford to invest upfront without too much risk of financial loss

2. The likelihood that the new scope or feature will motivate users enough to donate so that we recoup our development and support costs

In much of the OpenOffice.org code, the first criteria cannot be met as it involves trying to undo and rework the work of Sun's 100+ Hamburg engineering, testing, and documentation writing staff.

NeoOffice Mobile may not be the best idea. It is just the most workable one that we have thought of. Don't worry about abandonment. For Ed and I, NeoOffice is not a hobby and we treat all investment of time and money very seriously.

We aren't crazy enough to hand out NeoOffice Mobile access for a $5 donation. That would bury us. However, much of my coding experience before NeoOffice is implementing and support systems for several thousand users. By rolling it out as a benefit for a large donors, we can slowly test it out without much risk. Even if we assume that feature will be a hit among our core donors (only about 0.2% of users - 1 in 500 - donates $25 or more), we are really talking about a small number of users.

What we are trying to do is find the features that meet the above two criteria. I do see many requests for very specific features that a small number of people value highly because they are in Microsoft Office, but again we limit the scope because in most cases the cost is high and likelihood of recouping our limited funds is small.

That leaves us with the problem of what to invest in. I am not dead set on NeoOffice Mobile if there are more obvious, targeted features that we can do instead. Experience from the New Features Program made it clear that users will not invest in features upfront so we must do the investing. So, we are very interested in finding out what features we can do that is within our budget and skills.

Patrick
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2008 8:57 am    Post subject:

pluby wrote:
That leaves us with the problem of what to invest in. I am not dead set on NeoOffice Mobile if there are more obvious, targeted features that we can do instead. Experience from the New Features Program made it clear that users will not invest in features upfront so we must do the investing. So, we are very interested in finding out what features we can do that is within our budget and skills.


I want to highlight what I said in my last post: we are not starting work on this until after NeoOffice 2.2.4 is out next month so if any NeoOffice users out there who use NeoOffice most every day have some ideas for small features that would make their daily work more productive, let us know now.

It does not take much effort for Ed and I to determine if a new feature is within our budget so don't worry about cost at this point. However, please consider the appeal of the feature to the general NeoOffice user base as features that only 1% of users notice or appreciate nearly guarantees that we won't be able to recoup our investment through donations.

That is how we came up with NeoOffice Mobile: many Mac users (and many NeoOffice users) are using iDisk to shared their documents and since iDisk is not secure (last I checked everything including passwords is sent unencrypted) and does not help you convert your documents to a format that is easily read by people on a phone or PC.

Patrick
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rpatrick
Councilperson


Joined: Aug 29, 2007
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2008 9:51 am    Post subject:

Quote:
I want to highlight what I said in my last post: we are not starting work on this until after NeoOffice 2.2.4 is out next month so if any NeoOffice users out there who use NeoOffice most every day have some ideas for small features that would make their daily work more productive, let us know now.

It does not take much effort for Ed and I to determine if a new feature is within our budget so don't worry about cost at this point. However, please consider the appeal of the feature to the general NeoOffice user base as features that only 1% of users notice or appreciate nearly guarantees that we won't be able to recoup our investment through donations


The amazing thing about being able to talk directly to the developers - quite amazing. The second point about ideas only being desirable by a few people is the big thing isn't it - focusing in the areas people want. And the even more amazing thing is that I am always satisfied with Neo as it is - yet when new features are added I almost always find them useful and often wonder how i worked without them!

There is however one suggestion i have - I have a strong feeling it will be one of those that requires enormous work with the OOo code even though its only small - would it be better to post it in th New Features Forum?

Richard
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2008 11:24 am    Post subject:

rpatrick wrote:
There is however one suggestion i have - I have a strong feeling it will be one of those that requires enormous work with the OOo code even though its only small - would it be better to post it in th New Features Forum?


Yeah, post it in the New Features forum and then if we want, we can link to it in this topic.

Patrick
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA

PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2008 9:44 pm    Post subject:

Again, yup, this isn't a feature for everyone...in fact it's probably targeted at a minority of Neo users overall. Basically we have two classes of users, I think (I may be wrong): individuals (e.g. students, home users) and small groups of users (e.g. small NGOs, small business). For some of these users, document sharing and backup are definite needs and an integrated solution with their office suite (either OOo or Neo...) might be something helpful and for whom .Mac may not be fine grained enough.

I know it's something I personally would use very infrequently, perhaps never, but then again I know how to set up servers with SSH access for scp and the like and run servers Smile

This is one of the ideas we've been tossing around for a while, doing something like this and perhaps even some integrated iPhone viewers with this kind of a system now that the SDK is out. There never really was a break in which to even consider doing it before...

We've been keeping an eye on the incoming bug reports for OOo 3 Beta across multiple platforms and our gut feeling is that it needs some more time to stabilize before we start really diving in and working on it ourselves. Waiting until the code has stabilized minimizes the overhead of trying to keep up with code drift from major daily or weekly changes to underlying OOo code. We've been toying around with this document server idea as something we can get up and running in the meantime and something that may help out some of our users. And yeah, like Patrick mentioned above, S3 is one of the things that really makes it pretty viable even if it's just a small subset of people that would need or use the service.

Not sure if that makes any sense to anyone...the point for me is to put our thoughts and plans out there and see what everyone thinks. I'm hoping we can spend some time bantering this about in Milan and over our video conference services there as well Smile

ed
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jgd
Agent Smith


Joined: Feb 27, 2005
Posts: 1531
Location: France

PostPosted: Tue May 20, 2008 11:14 am    Post subject:

If I've well understood, with this feature an user will be able to give a link to a NeoOffice document when he posts a question about this document on the forum?

If yes, this new feature doesn't concern 1% of users, but a lot of users Smile

Jacqueline
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi


Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH

PostPosted: Tue May 20, 2008 12:42 pm    Post subject:

I don't think that is the point of it, though it may well be possible (depending on the permissions system). I also think Patrick and Ed are referring to NeoOffice users, not forum users Smile.

Best wishes,
Oscar

_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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jgd
Agent Smith


Joined: Feb 27, 2005
Posts: 1531
Location: France

PostPosted: Tue May 20, 2008 1:09 pm    Post subject:

I agree with you. But usually a forum user who posts a question concerning a NeoOffice document is a NeoOffice user Smile
He will have to do a little donation, and that's normal…

Jacqueline
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Tue May 20, 2008 1:33 pm    Post subject:

jgd wrote:
I agree with you. But usually a forum user who posts a question concerning a NeoOffice document is a NeoOffice user Smile
He will have to do a little donation, and that's normal…


So something that I have not mentioned but is critical to getting NeoOffice Mobile well tested and noticed by users is that we will have a "demo" system that any NeoOffice user can use through a guest account to try out the system.

In fact, I see the demo system being the only system available in NeoOffice at first as letting people play around in a demo system will help us uncover any bugs and, more importantly, find out if any cares about the new feature.

Potentially, users could post documents in the demo system. The only caveat is that to keep costs down, old files more than a week or two old will likely be purged from the demo system.

Patrick
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