Application to CeBIT

[Inge Wallin]

I have sent an application for a sponsored booth for Koffice at CeBIT this 
year too. See 
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Events/CeBIT-Open-Source-2011-Call-for-Projects 
for the call for applications

The text I sent was the following. I think I have managed to hit the points 
that they emphasized in the criteria. Of course, at the time of the 
exhibition, it will no longer be called KOffice, but there is plenty of time 
between the release and when we are actually there to change it to Calligra 
Suite instead of KOffice.

        -Inge

------------------------------------------

KOffice is the leading free office suite for mobile environments and also 
available on the desktop.  It contains office productivity applications and 
two graphics applications.  

The office productivity applications are:
 - KWord: word processor
 - KSpread: spreadsheet
 - KPresenter: presentation application
 - Kexi: Database handler in the style of MS Access
 - KPlato: Project Management Tool

The graphics applications are:
 - Krita: advanced paint application
 - Karbon: vector graphics application.

KOffice resides inside the KDE community, but has it's own contributor base. 
The project is extremely active with over 100 contributors, including 
translators. The core developer group is 15-20 people and the total number of 
code contributors around 70. The last stable release had over 4500 commits 
spread over 6 months and the upcoming version 2.3 will have even more.

Since last year, KOffice has managed to become the leader in mobile and 
embedded environments. KOffice is the only free office suite (and maybe the 
only anywhere) to provide a so called Office Engine on which any number of 
different User Interfaces can be created. So far there are user interfaces for 
the desktop, one for mobile (called FreOffice) and also an upcoming user 
interface for touch tablets running MeeGo.

Koffice is heavily sponsored by Nokia for use in their mobile phones starting 
with the N900 and we know of several other companies that are running internal 
projects where the KOffice Office Engine is used to create new office 
experiences. Commercial support for KOffice can be had from KO GmbH 
(http://www.kogmbh.com/) in Germany.

We think that the KOffice Office Engine is very relevant to the industry right 
now because of it's innovative approach to user interfaces and it's 
portability to all form factors and input methods, including both 
keyboard+mouse and touch screens. It is also obvious that the industry has 
taken KOffice to its hearts with several ongoing projects.

As a community, we are sponsored by the KDE e.V to participate in events like 
CeBIT, so we are certain that we will be able to bring enough presenters to 
the event and to cover the required time.