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 expand the synchronization capabilities to work with an expanded set of small-device applications.

StarLite Team
Name
 Function
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 Sharypov
 StarCalc for PalmOS
Maline Minasandram
 Manager

At this point the project was transfered to Dublin, Ireland. The first step was to refactor the code so that filters could be written not just for palm devices but any device. This included writing a registry for xmerge so that it could keep track of which filters were included and what formats they could convert to/from. Next, filters for Pocket Excel and Pocket Word were written. Once this was completed an Active Sync conduit was written so that XMerge 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 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.

XMerge Team
Name
 Function
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