Development of FreOffice towards Calligra Mobile

[suresh.chande at nokia.com]

Greetings for the new Year !!

As FreOffice is maturing and getting better day by day it would be good to start to develop the Calligra way of working in planning future development of FreOffice and aligning with the Calligra release plans. Currently the code base is all part of Calligra trunk under tools. We think it would best fit into Calligra as a mobile edition of the suite and we could consider relocating or structuring FreOffice as mobile UI. We have been discussing that it would also be a good time to consider renaming FreOffice to align more closer to Calligra. Calligra Mobile is an option which might align with Calligra. It would be good to hear your opinion about this way of development for FreOffice.  

One of the key and fundamental next step in development of Calligra Mobile suite is to make it end user ready (as mobile clients in Maemo, MeeGo, etc, environments). This basically means that it would require atleast the following from my perspective: 
- Clean up the code architecturally and make it clean and modular (Already being actively developed by Mani and Jaroslaw and more)
- Ensure there are no crashes in the UI and is stable
- Make the mobile office stable and address some of the usability issues identified by the analysis made so far
- Identify and Document the APIs required to use Calligra backend and agree these to be become API Calligra suite will provide
- Agree if we should merge the IRC channel(currently #FreOffice @ Freenode) or just keep the mobile stream and desktop discussions parallel
- Clean up the UI plug-in architecture and make the current plug-ins stable and utilize only stable plugins for the next release
- Update the software based on end user feedback and improve usability issues which are stopping from using the FreOffice for real world use cases
- For Maemo 5 move the application from development edition to end user ready version and get real users to use- 
For MeeGo environment Move the current Qt version of FreOffice on Maemo 5 with minimal updates and repackaging into MeeGo platform 1.2 (Under development)
- Later plan to enhance the UI by developing QML based UI for MeeGo Platform and contribute as a reference implementation for Office viewer there
- In future:  MeeGo has multiple Ux environments and we would like to enhance the Mobile Ux to scalable to other ux if time permits.
- Others please add any other wish list or things I have missed out.. 

We are also having a lot of interest from university students to consider projects in mobile office area as their research project areas so we will make a place holder in the wiki to list down a set of projects and report progress as students develop further.

I created a wiki page in the Calligra wiki and invite us to comment and contribute to the above development plan. http://community.kde.org/Calligra/CalligraMobile 
Once we agree the way forward we should see an update on the features planned at the location: http://community.kde.org/Calligra/Schedules/2.4/Feature_Plan 

Thanks and with best regards, 
Suresh Chande on behalf of all contributors of FreOffice