The official monthly announcement for the article contest is out

The june winner of the OOo Article Contest is Kohei Yoshida for its
" Hacking Calc - The first steps"

Other articles are pending and will be re-evaluated in the next sessions. They're still in competition, so many chance to win :)

The July session ends at the end of the month, so feel free to submit any article on whatever aspect of OOo development you want to cover. Remember, this contest is sponsored ...

The past articles can be red on the OOo Wiki

The dictionaries installer DicOOo has been released under version 1.6

Dictionaries are now automatically activated at installation time and will be available for use just after restarting OOo. There is no more need to deal with Tools > Options > Linguistic settings ...

The update will be prompted on the next use of your DicOOo which is still available in File > Wizards > Install new dictionnaries

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 has been announced as out !
(french version is expected in the coming hours)

This announcement provides a security bulletin dealing with 3 potential vulnerabilities detected by internal security audits.

if you can not install this new 2.0.3 version for whatever reason, the issue dealing with java applet can be countered as mentionned on the Java Applets, CVE-2006-2199 dedicated page
(be carefull that other issues remain !!)

The solution proposed works great by deactivating java applets but is not so easy to deploy at large scale or for regular users. So i used the OOo Tools for what they are made for : The UNO Package concept that allow to create great extensions but also deploy configuration settings

So this addon reproduces what is proposed on the CVE page. It works for OOo 2.x as well as OOo 1.x

To deploy under OOo 2.x

• Tools > Package Manager > add and select the zip file
  or
  

• launch <OOoInstall>/program/unopkg <ZipFilePath>

To deploy under OOo 1.x

• launch <OOoInstall>/program/pkgchk <ZipFilePath>

Note that running these command lines with the -s switch (for share) let you deploy the addon for all your users

For testing that the patch has been applied correctly, you can insert an applet (eg. the JavaClock.class can be used for testing purpose) and see if it does not run.

You insert a java Applet though

• Insert > Object > Applet

Once the patch applied, only a drawing with the name of the applet should be displayed and the applet should not run anymore

This check also apply to already created document containing applets