[ANN] LIbreOffice 4.4.0 Beta1 available

Dear Community,

The Document Foundation is pleased to announce the first Beta
release of LibreOffice 4.4.0. The upcoming 4.4.0 will be the ninth
major release of LibreOffice, coming with a bunch of new features
beside the usual bugfixes.

The Beta1 can be installed alongside the stable version, so feel free
to give it a try. Beta1 is not ready for production yet, and while
Beta1 marks feature freeze, final UI and string freeze is yet to come,
and translations are not complete.

A work-in-progress list of new features in LibreOffice 4.4 can be
found at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.4

The release is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from our QA
builds download page at

  http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases

Developers and QA might also be interested in the symbol server for
windows debug information (see the release notes linked below for
details)

Should you find bugs, please report them to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla:

  https://bugs.freedesktop.org

A good way to assess the release candidate quality is to run some
specific manual tests on it, our TCM wiki page has more details:

 http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Testing/Regression_Tests#Full_Regression_Test

For other ways to get involved with this exciting project - you can
e.g. contribute code:

  http://www.libreoffice.org/community/developers/

translate LibreOffice to your language:

  http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Localization_Guide

or help with funding our operations:

  http://donate.libreoffice.org/

A list of known issues and fixed bugs with 4.4.0 Beta1 is available
from our wiki:

  http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.4.0/Beta1

Let us close again with a BIG Thank You! to all of you having
contributed to the LibreOffice project - this release would not have
been possible without your help.

On behalf of the Community,

Christian