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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: KOffice potential, a call for developers
From:       Philippe Rigault <prigault () oricom ! ca>
Date:       2005-01-08 15:12:13
Message-ID: 200501081012.13841.prigault () oricom ! ca
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Hi,

Please find my comments below.
I am interested in making your post more attractive for 
organizations/businesses/senior-individuals that could contribute to koffice 
(I am not so interested at random junior volunteers).

Best regards,

Philippe Rigault


> KOffice is one of the youngest office suites available.
I would suppress this (irrelevant, and not accurate).

> And it is 
> built on KDE. This advantage brings enormous potential in terms of
> integration, performance and even scalability which are vital for
> business deployments. 
Excellent, this is the key point.

> You can help to utilize these capabilities and 
> bring the full potential of KOffice to life.
>
I would rather say:
The Koffice team is looking at contributors for significantly increasing the 
potential of Koffice.

> The functionality KOffice has already reached in its short life is
> incredible if we consider the small number of developers that made
> this happen. 
Avoid using adjectives like 'amazing', 'incredible', 'tremendous'. Use 
objectivity instead.

Having a small number of developers is a _bad_ feature that does not inspire 
confidence to an organization (btw, it is no excuse for the state of a 
program. Remember: to the --uneducated-- world, Linux has all been written by 
one guy...).

> And still, KOffice has a great performance despite all 
> the functionality already implemented. This makes it even usable on
> quite old hardware.
>
I would prefer something like:

KOffice has great performance and is fully usable on low-end hardware, which 
makes it suited for organizations and individuals. (you can elaborate on 
return-on-investment and recycling hardware if you like).

Note: 'great performance' means different things to different people. People 
using large spreadsheets (>10,000 rows) might not be so thrilled about 
kspread's current limitations and performance (and OOo for that matter).

> Because KOffice is built directly on KDE, it can offer the best office
> experience on a KDE desktop. 

This is a very important point (the most important IMHO), which differentiates 
koffice from all other suites (including OOo with KDE-look).
Please give it more importance.

I can think of a few clear distinctions:
- the communication framework between applications (DCOP)
- the complete abstraction of document location (accessing a file by path, 
URL, fish://)
- startup time and interactivity
- Full Qt framework

Examples targeted at showing this are missing.
My experience is that showing real-life examples is key. Each time I show a 
5-minute demo of what I can do on my KDE desktop, people go WOW, because some 
concepts basic for us (DCOP and fish:// are examples) are new to them.

> Even full OASIS document format support 
> is targeted for the next release (1.4) which is the same file format
> as OpenOffice.org 2 will have. This will make data exchange with
> OpenOffice.org seamless!
>
If you bring OOo in the picture, please provide arguments for differentiating 
Koffice form it. If one wants OASIS document formas, why would he/she run 
Koffice instead of OOo ?

> Much work has already been done, but KOffice simply needs more
> developers to fully utilize and implement the potential it has. 
> Many 
> central office components like KWord, KPresenter, Kivio and KSpread
> are already quite stable but still have a few glitches here and
> there.
> Karbon14 (vector graphics) and Kugar (report generator) are in 
> a less good shape because of lack of developers. Also smaller
> components like KFormula, KChart or KDGantt could use some attention.
>
The key to attracting contributors to a project is to show them
- that the project is interesting and has visibility (they don't want to miss 
the boat)
- that the increase in contributors is done for a reason, i.e ther is a plan 
for using the added resources (they will take the boat to go somewhere).

I don't see much on the second point there. I think that establishing a clear, 
ambitious list of priorities is a must.

> And KOffice has many more applications to offer that will hopefully be
> included in next major releases: Krita (Pixmap Graphics), Kexi
> (Database Frontend) and KPlato (Project Management).
Remove 'hopefully' (after all, developers/packagers have the full control on 
what is happening).

> All these 
> applications are in development, have a huge potential ... and could
> use more human resources.
>
Counterproductive statement if it does not show that resources are targeted at 
a precise outcome.

> As you can see, KOffice is close to offer a very complete office
> environment, probably the most feature complete office suite
> available,
Er, I am not sure I would go as far as that.
Koffice lags _far_ behind other suites in MS-compatibility.
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