Hi Everybody,

I've just had this wonderful experience at an OpenSolaris User's Group that I have to share with you.

You may not know it, but I am in Connecticut, USA, right now, although I'm usually in Hamburg. Since this is a rare opportunity, Ken Baer from Sun asked me to speak on "OOo in the Enterprise" on July 1 at the meeting of the OSUG he organized here in Hartford. I said "sure I will!" without hesitation because, as anyone who has ever been in the same room or on the phone with me will agree, I love to talk ;-) and I love OpenOffice.org!

Well I am glad I went, because not only were most of the people there really interesting and interested, but the venue was one of a kind: The Hartford Club. (Since it is so spiffy, I even wore high-heels! Now I shocked you, huh. :-) ) Unfortunately my photos all came out poorly because it was rather dark, but suffice it to say that I felt perfect in high-heels and "kleine Schwarze" (little black dress) as they say in German. Some guys commented that my dress added class to the event, seeing as they were in "business casual". But honestly, I had so many important things to communicate about OOo, who was looking at my dress?

There were 25 people attending. Only 5 of them had ever used OOo. (Can you believe it!?) I told them all about OpenOffice.org and StarOffice as compared to MSO (as much as can be done in 15 minutes) and talked about the open source community, open source in general, open standards. I had very few slides, really. I just had a conversation with the guys. They asked me questions and I asked them questions. It was fun and after my short, candid, informative, mildly humorous and enthusiastic talk (if I might say so myself :-) ) people came up to me to ask for additional handouts to take to their bosses, ask for more info on what other products can be used to create an open source stack to replace MS products (Of course I said Thunderbird, Firefox and co.), my experience with different platforms and version, etc.

Speaking of different platforms, a big WOW errupted in the room when, at the very end of my presentation, I pointed out that I had started preparing my presentation on StarOffice 9 on my Solaris Sun Ray, then finished it on a Windows Vista using OpenOffice.org 3.1, then took it on a USB stick to the venue and asked the friendly Sun guy, Dave Donmoyer, who was presenting ahead of me to let me present on his Mac using NeoOffice (sorry I forgot which version). I used the odp file with absolutely no glitches. Not once did I convert it to a different file format. I'm telling you, the whole audience was VERY impressed. My last comment was "Try doing that with MSOffice" in a tongue in cheek sort of way.Oh that felt good.

Then we adjourned to the lounge and billiard room. (!) Since my pics didn't come out very well, please see the Observatory blog where Brian Leonard, who I met at the OSUG, posted about a previous event.

tags: enterprise user-experience