[Libreoffice] Revive development of the OOo plugin for Alfresco ECM, for LibreOffice

[Cedric Bosdonnat]

Hi David,

On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 18:35 +0800, David Nelson wrote:
> Many of you guys may not be aware that the LibreOffice project has an
> Alfresco ECM platform at http://alfresco.libreoffice.org (the Alfresco
> Explorer interface) and http://documentation.libreoffice.org (the
> Alfresco Share interface).

I heard about it, but never checked that ;)

> In addition, there is a currently-dormant project on the Alfresco
> Forge [1]: an OOo plugin for Alfresco, to allow one to interact with
> an Alfresco repository from within the office suite (download, upload,
> edit documents; etc.).

I know at least 3 plugins to connect OOo / LO with Alfresco.
  * One was developped by Sun (proprietary)
  * One was developped by StarXpert (initiated by me)
http://www.starxpert.fr/spip/Alfresco-Extensions#opal. I'm not sure how
active that one is... though I'ld bet it's nearly dead.
  * One was mimicking the MSO plugin (the one you pointed to)

> I feel it would be generally extremely useful functionality for
> LibreOffice to get this plugin working properly. We would have a
> perfect test bed and pilot user base: the LibreOffice Afresco
> platform, which is currently being used as a docs repository and
> workflow facility by the LibreOffice English docs team.
> 
> I've been in contact with Jeff Potts (Alfresco's Chief Community
> Officer) and Paul Holmes-Higgin (Alfresco's VP of Engineering), and
> Jeff is setting-up a confcall for the week of June 27 with Roeland
> Hofkens, one of the admins of the said Alfresco Forge project, which
> I'll be attending.
> 
> Are there any devs here who would be willing to get involved as well?

I'ld love to be in that kind of project again :)

> @Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens:
> Jeff Potts also wrote me that, "We'd also like to make a strong
> suggestion to make LibreOffice a CMIS consumer so that LibreOffice
> users would be able to easily open and save documents as well as set
> metadata on documents that live in a CMIS-compliant repository like
> Alfresco. More info on CMIS can be found here [2] and here [3]. Maybe
> there's an opportunity for us to help each other out?"
> 
> Could I ask what your thoughts and suggestions would be about this?

I would be in favor of that possibility more than any of the other ones.
Dan Corneanu has been working on a nice extension to implement a CMIS
protocol provider. His work can be found here on gitorious though it
isn't completely finished IIRC.

http://gitorious.org/libreoffice-cmis

I'ld go for pushing that extension further to get it integrated in
LibreOffice. That would also ease the switch to any other CMIS-enabled
ECM.

-- 
Cédric Bosdonnat
LibreOffice hacker
http://documentfoundation.org
OOo Eclipse Integration developer
http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr