Excellarate’s client is a provider of office Productivity and Collaboration Suite for Mobile and Desktop. The client needed new functionality, improved interoperability with MS Office and performance optimizations in LibreOffice. The Excellarate team successfully delivered it and the app was trending in Top 10 in Apple AppStore (US).
Excellarate’s Role
The Excellarate team helped client refine interoperability of the LibreOffice Writer with Microsoft Word. The team enhanced the LibreOffice open source libraries, which helped in bridging feature gaps between MS Office (OOXML) and LibreOffice (ODF).
The team understood both the Office file formats, studied the OOXML and ODF specifications, did content mapping, and successfully performed the Microsoft Office to LibreOffice Roundtrip. The round-trip consisted of opening a .DOCX file in LibreOffice and saving it back as .DOCX passing through import filter, core engine and export filter.
Challenges & Solutions
As the code of LibreOffice was developed over two decades and changed umbrella under various open source projects, understanding the code was quite a task for Excellarate team. The team overcame this by building a “knowledge matrix” for reference, which helped in enhancing the knowledge for solving complex issues.
The team also generated a pre-defined mapping for which in-depth knowledge of OOXML specification was required. Knowing how the mapping was exercised in Microsoft Office documents required much research but was done successfully by Excellarate team.
The QA team also developed an automation engine for the round-trip process and file comparison. The file comparison engine measured visual and data loss incurred during round-trip process. There were different test data buckets used to measure the improvement e.g. file complexity (low, moderate and high), file size (small, medium, large), file format versions (Office 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010).
Results
- Excellarate significantly improved interoperability of following features between LibreOffice Writer and Microsoft Word:
- Charts, shapes (VML), images, videos
- Lists, fields, headers and footers
- File crash and corruptions
- Tables
- Document sections, paragraph, line spacing
- Table of contents (TOC), page layout, index, captions, glossary, bibliography/citations
- OLE Objects/ActiveX, CustomXML
The team continued to refine interoperability of the LibreOffice Writer with Microsoft Word. They also worked towards enhancing the LibreOffice open source libraries, which helped bridging feature gaps between Microsoft Office (OOXML) and LibreOffice (ODF).
In numbers, the team delivered the following
- The team fixed around 550 file corruptions or LibreOffice crashes.
- The team contributed 150 code patches to LibreOffice making it one of the key contributors across TDF (The Document Foundation).
- Team filed around 300+ interoperability defects and closely worked with TDF quality team.
- Excellarate was one of the top teams contributing to LibreOffice ecosystem with 20 engineers as TDF members.
- Excellarate team, helped client to offer “offline mode” for the Productivity App which was critical success factor, customize the collaborative solution, eliminate business sensitive external vendor dependency and save huge licensing cost.
Excellarate team successfully delivered the LibreOffice Writer core engine with improved interoperability with Microsoft Word in a year’s time. The App went live as planned and was trending in Top 10 in Apple AppStore (US) under productivity category.
Ultimately, this successful product offered a very successful exit for the client by getting acquired by a prominent and highly successfully Silicon Valley productivity giant.
