The recently concluded LibreOffice Confernce in Paris announced interesting enhancements which will take LibreOffice to new heights in days to come. It's just over an year since the initial beta release of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation(TDF) has come a long way with LibreOffice. Now TDF has set their sights much higher. Read onto find out more. 

Right from the launch, LibreOffice has drawn interest, appreciation and support from open source backers.  While several major open source projects have seen forks, it's only LibreOffice which has grown big. This cross-platform office suite has seen two major releases so far with lot of improvements in each release. LibreOffice downloads have always seen increase in the numbers and The Document Foundation (TDF) estimates during the first anniversary state 25 million users are using LibreOffice worldwide. TDF aims to reach 200 million userbase by the end of this decade.

The announcements made at the ongoing LibreOffice official conference at Paris promises great times ahead for the lovers of this open source productivity suite. LibreOffice will be ported to the web as an online office suite and also to mobile devices, predominantly to those running Android and iOS.

A video of online prototype of LibreOffice shown in the conference showcases LibreOffice Online running on Firefox 4.0 beta 12 impressively. It uses HTML5 along with Canvas/Web sockets plus gtk-broadway. The prototype was working very much like the desktop application with toolbars, context menus etc. It implies easy WYSIWYG editing online. Spreadsheet application running VBA macros was also shown. The application is said to use PNG Compressed deltas to reduce bandwidth consumption, again a necessity. What is not going to be implemented now is simple shared screen colloboration, which I believe will come in the final release.

Though it is very early to comment on this, it would be interesting to see whether there will be a paid version of the online application with more online storage and additional colloborative features. If you are interested to know more and keep track of the developments tune to LibreOffice developers mailing list.

With this kind of growth and revolutionary thoughts of enabling an online version of  LibreOffice there is absolutely no doubt  that LibreOffice will be the No.1 office application in days to come. LibreOffice's gaining of the top-spot can be a strong answer to the masses who complain about inferior office applications provided in Linux desktops.

Note: All these announcements are set to become a reality only late in 2012 or early 2013.