Background of XMerge

Xmerge came out of project Starlite. The goal of Starlite was to provide mobility to StarOffice documents. The Starlite team developed spreadsheet and document viewer applications with limited editing capabilities for PalmOS. These applications were designed to synchronize with the StarWriter and StarCalc applications on the desktop.

Project ZenSync was the second phase of project Starlite to enable synchronization between StarPortal (a web-based version of its StarOffice) and an expanded set of small-device applications. The team designed and developed an architecture that would allow third parties to plug-in their converters to support their proprietary document formats. This work was enhanced by the team in Ireland (led by Brian Cameron).

Name	Function
StarLite Team
Akhil Arora	Tech Lead
Eileen Bugee	Visual designer
Eric Bergman	Human factors design
David Proulx	StarWriter for PalmOS
Herbie Ong	Converters for StarWriter
Paul Rank	StarCalc for PalmOS
Raju Pallath	Quality
Stephen Mak	Converters for StarCalc
Denis Antrushin	StarCalc for PalmOS
Maline Minasandram	Manager

At this point the project was transfered to Dublin, Ireland. The first step was to refactor the code from the ZenSync converter library/framework so that filters could be written not just for palm devices but any device. This included writing a registry manager to keep track of which filters were included and what formats could be converted. Next, filters for Pocket Excel and Pocket Word were written. Once this was completed an Active Sync conduit was written so that the framework could be used to convert Pocket PC files on a handheld to StarOffice files on a PC automatically through ActiveSync. The decision was then taken to open source the project, naming it XMerge and make it available on OpenOffice. This involved hosting the code on OpenOffice CVS, adding the web pages and writing the documentation for filter writers. Once hosted on the website a FlatXML and DocBook filter were added. The final step in the project was to include XMerge in StarOffice.

Name	Function
XMerge Team
Brian Cameron	Tech Lead
Aidan Butler	FlatXML & Docbook filter, Integration into StarOffice
Mike Hayes	Code design work, Code refactoring, Pocket Excel filter
Darren Kenny	Code design work, OpenOffice web hosting
Martin Maher	Pocket Excel filter, Code refactoring
Mark Murnane	Pocket Word filter, ActiveSync, Integration into StarOffice
James Cleere	Manager