The Document Foundation Certification Program

The Document Foundation has begun certifying premier developers in their quest for world productivity domination. Certification "is not just another piece of paper, or an abbreviation next to the name," it means recognition for the "ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users."

Yesterday Italo Vignoli posted on TDF blog of the first certified developers. There are many familiar names amongst this first group. Some include Michael Meeks from SUSE, Tor Lillqvist also from SUSE, Bjoern Michaelsen from Canonical, and Caolan McNamara from Red Hat. "Certification strengthens the relationship with partners, while ensuring a quality of service good enough to avoid problems to final users."

TDF considers the certification program a "key milestone" for LibreOffice and that it will "increase the number of organizations capable of adding value around the best free office suite ever." TDF also believes certification can address "corporate requests for added value development and support services." The outline actually explains it a bit better:

TDF will promote the ecosystem through it´s channels and with an aggressive marketing campaign targeted to corporate users, in order to increase LibreOffice adoption based on value added services provided by certified professionals for migration, integration, development, support and training. TDF members actively involved in one of these areas will be certified for free, provided that they can demonstrate that their skills comply with the standards. Otherwise, LibreOffice Certification will be fee based, and the fee might vary according to the value provided by the partner to the project.

Certified partners will sell value added services to their customers and promote them to their prospects, develop and promote specific value added services for vertical markets, bundle LibreOffice with personal computers, and grow customer relations together with TDF. Certified partners will be requested to stick to the certification requirements, and provide a report about challenges and opportunities related to LibreOffice Certification.

End users will benefit from value added services provided by certified professionals, and will indirectly support the growth of TDF and LibreOffice.