Montag Juni 02, 2008

Sharjah school adopts OpenOffice.org
"Sharjah-based SIA chose a number of freely available open-source programs - including OpenOffice and the Solaris 10 operating system - to run on top of its new thin clients and servers from Sun Microsystems, which it finished installing last year. ... SIA has installed sixteen thin clients in its student labs, with an option to increase to 70 clients in the future. The implementation includes two Sun servers running Solaris 10 and serving virtual instances of Windows XP to the thin clients via VMware."
Found here.
( Jun 02 2008, 12:41:50 PM CEST ) Permalink

Samstag Mai 31, 2008

Survey: Strong Use of Open Source Desktop Applications
"That's no longer the case, according to a survey of IT and business executives and managers, conducted in late April 2008 by CIO.com. The survey, collecting data from 328 respondents, showed that more than half the respondents (53 percent) are using open-source applications in their organization today, and an additional 10 percent plan to do so in the next year. For nearly half, 44 percent, open-source applications are considered equally with proprietary solutions during the acquisition process.

Among those currently employing open-source solutions, the primary uses are operating systems such as Linux (78 percent), infrastructure applications, such as back-end databases and Web servers (74 percent), and software development tools like Eclipse (61 percent).

Those may sound fairly geeky, but business application use isn't far behind. Nearly half of the survey respondents, 45 percent, are using desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org, and 29 percent use open-source enterprise applications. The most popular of those enterprise applications are collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) tools and ERP applications."

Found here.
( Mai 31 2008, 05:43:43 AM CEST ) Permalink

Dienstag Mai 27, 2008

What are your experiences with Zotero?
I just came across this blog entry about Zotero, where it says:
"When you visit a website like ScienceDirect, and start reading a paper, a little icon will appear on the address bar. Click it and Zotero will save the citation information to its library. It can spit that information into Microsoft Word or OpenOffice in lots of different formats."
Just curious, what are your experiences with Zotero? Does it work for you as an alternative to EndNote?
( Mai 27 2008, 08:06:24 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [4]

German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Deploys StarOffice
According to this German article, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is switching to StarOffice for all 500 desktop PCs. 90% of the BSI employees have already gone through the migration. Another great success story for ODF!
( Mai 27 2008, 02:57:01 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [2]

OpenOffice.org Event in Brussels
I just learned that the ProFoss event in Brussels on June 10 will have a focus on OpenOffice.org. The list of speakers sounds very interesting!
( Mai 27 2008, 11:22:32 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Donnerstag Mai 22, 2008

Huge Success for the ODF Community
First, I warmly welcome Microsoft to the community of ODF supporters. As most of you will have noticed by now, Microsoft just announced that they will start supporting ODF out of the box with Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. My favorite statement from the Microsoft announcement is the following promise: "It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007." Thus, very soon it should be very easy for organizations to standardize their document workflows on ODF, because the "average employee" does not need any special skills for saving to ODF anymore. Very cool!

Initially, Microsoft will support ODF 1.1 which is the most current OASIS standard. Since Microsoft is "committed to providing Office users with greater choice among document formats and enhanced interoperability" I also hope that Microsoft will soon start adding support for the upcoming ODF 1.2 because ODF 1.2 was designed to improve and extend interoperability between different ODF implementations. For example, ODF 1.2 adds a formula language and a W3C standards based metadata model. Thus, ODF 1.2 should also make mapping Excel formulas to ODF easier. Anyway, "Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of ODF". Thus, Microsoft's participation at OASIS should eliminate the worries and the inertia of people who were afraid of standardizing their document workflows on ODF in the past. With Microsoft's genuine participation in the ODF TC, ODF should evolve into a truly cross-plattform, cross-application and cross-vendor document format standard.

Second, I have to congratulate all the early supporters and adopters of ODF, i.e. the larger ODF Community. The work, and in some cases the courage, of many many individuals has led to a "market" which can't be ignored by vendors any longer. According to Google searches for various file types, ODF is still the most popular XML document file format, at least based on the number of document files posted to the Web. OpenOffice.org, which is just one implementation of ODF, is currently being downloaded more than 1.2M times per week and being distributed by popular hardware products like the Asus Eee PC. Government organizations around the world are adopting OpenOffice.org and/or ODF and have started to help each other with their adoption challenges. Thus, ODF has become a "market force" that can't be ignored anymore. Thus, again, congratulations and thank you to all the people who have contributed to the success of OpenOffice.org and ODF so far! Well done!
( Mai 22 2008, 06:44:27 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [2]

Mittwoch Mai 21, 2008

OpenOffice.org at LinuxTag Berlin
OpenOffice.org will have a strong presence at LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin. In the Sun booth, OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta will be demo'd including two new OpenOffice.org extensions, the Sun PDF Import Extension and the Sun Presenter Console. Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning will be shown as well. In addition, there will be quite a few OpenOffice.org sessions as part of the conference program.
( Mai 21 2008, 06:10:33 PM CEST ) Permalink

Dienstag Mai 20, 2008

Interested in some extra money???
Are you interested in some extra money??? If yes, you should check out the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Program. Maybe there is something you could do until 23 June 2008 that would let you win a price!?

If you're a great developer, but can't come up with a good idea yourself, check out this list of ideas. I could also imagine someone porting and integrating the 3D slide effects that were developed during a past Google Summer of Code project. Another interesting idea would be adding special photo editing effects similar to the ones offered by the open source command line tools ImageMagick. Extending ODFDOM and doing something cool with it might be another idea. Making students' life easier by improving and extending the Zotero integration could be cool as well. I guess some people also would love to see the Flash export in OpenOffice.org support slide animations and other special effects. Additional chart types would be nice, too. Finally, if you're looking for ideas how to get a share of the $175,000, you can always query for the OpenOffice.org issues with the highest numbers of votes.
( Mai 20 2008, 10:52:52 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

New Blog about ODF Development Tools
J. David Eisenberg, the author of the online book "OASIS OpenDocument Essentials", just started a cool new blog about ODF development tools. I'm looking forward to all the articles!
( Mai 20 2008, 09:34:53 AM CEST ) Permalink

Donnerstag Mai 15, 2008

Another cool OpenOffice.org review
"The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads, even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece. Where the X11 interface felt choppy and looked…like an X11 interface, OO 3.0 definitely looks and feels like a fully integrated Aqua application, with menus being very responsive and keyboard shortcuts working (mostly - hey, it’s beta) as expected. How does each behave in this newly integrated world? Let’s take a look.
...
I was truly impressed by just how well the two programs worked together, making me a bit more confident if I ever have to use OO 3.0 to edit/share docs with others. I did not have an opportunity to test the new collaboration (i.e. track/merge) feature.
...
Some features spread across the individual components and others were just noteworthy or interesting. For example, when comparing the PDF export feature in Calc, it wound up creating a smaller file than the OS X “print to PDF” option and created table of contents labels based on the spreadsheet tab names."

Found here.
( Mai 15 2008, 01:10:34 AM CEST ) Permalink

More OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Mac OS X Feedback
"Just a few words here... The Openoffice Aqua is still only an alpha version, - not even a beta.:-)

but when this said, I can only say that the last build of OpenOffice 3.0 Aqua is running very, very stable on both OS X 10.4.11PPC/10.5.2PPC as well as on a MacPro with both 10.4.11 and 10.5.2.

It is more that three times as fast as NeoOffice and more than twice as fast than both MSOffice 2004 and 2008! - And until now i haven't had a single 'unexpected quit' with the last two builds of OOo3.0. - Also the fonts handling is quite a lot better than in NeoOffice and MSO2004/2008. - I have apprx. 1550 fonts active in my main set, and apprx. 23.000 fonts on the HD - all 100% managed by Linotype Fontexplorer.

So now printing with quite a lot of various fonts and various typefaces within the same font is just like a dream, though the OOo crew still tells us that printing can be a problem.:-)

So what can't we expect, when first OpenOffice 3.0 Final is released? - Mmmmm.... I can hardly wait.:-)"

Found here. What are your experiences on the Mac?
( Mai 15 2008, 12:41:51 AM CEST ) Permalink

Cool OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Feedback
I just came across the following OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta feedback:

"I've been using the beta version of Open Office 3 for a week now and am quite impressed. It is a Mac-native build that doesn't require X11. It seems quite stable and noticeably faster than NeoOffice and Office 2008. There's no Entourage equivalent but an interesting database component. The spreadsheet and presentation components seem more or less equivalent to Office. And OO does have a pretty robust macro system built in.

The database component isn't really a complete db in and of itself, rather a front end that connects to database servers like MySQL. As such it requires a bit more technical savvy than the average user is likely to have, but opens interesting possibilities for custom database management.

Import and export of OO and Office files is very good. I'm worked with some heavily formatted Word files and a reasonably complex Excel spreadsheet. OO maintained the formatting and formulas better than iWork 08.

OO has a seemingly deep built in help system that provides on-hover pop up boxes that explain extra functionality.

As an open source project the fit and finish are not up to Microsoft standards let alone Apple's, but OO is not butt ugly either.

My biggest quibble is that scrolling with a scroll wheel is slow, even on 5 page Writer documents. Also the conversion between Windows/Linux conventions isn't complete. When mousing over an embedded hyperlink, OO instructed me to "Ctrl-click" on the link to open it in my browser. Oops. With a Mac that's Cmd (command)-click. (I did submit a bug ticket)

Still, I'm very impressed with the first public release beta of OO for OS X. It is both faster and more stable than the Office 08 demo I tried out. Since I'm not working in a corporate setting and don't need absolute compatibility with Microsoft, I see no reason to purchase Office 2008 for an Intel native office suite. The presentation module isn't near as slick as Keynote but the word processing and spreadsheets are more capable than Pages and Numbers. If you need that extra functionality then give OO a try."

Pretty cool! I found the feedback on this page.
( Mai 15 2008, 12:38:32 AM CEST ) Permalink

Mittwoch Mai 14, 2008

OpenSolaris running on popular Eee PC
Very cool! I just found out that OpenSolaris can be installed on the popular Asus Eee PC. Yesterday at the local book store I also noticed the first books about the Eee PC showing up on the shelves. During my recent trip to the US, I noticed the Eee PC everywhere, at JavaOne, at Starbucks, etc. For example, I asked the guy at Starbucks how happy he was with the pre-installed OpenOffice.org. He told me that he is extremely happy and that he is recommending OpenOffice.org to all his friends. He also recommends OpenOffice.org to all his evening class students. Thus, it's nice to see the Eee PC have such a positive impact on OpenOffice.org's market share.
( Mai 14 2008, 07:19:06 AM CEST ) Permalink

Donnerstag Mai 08, 2008

199 Euro laptop with OpenOffice.org pre-installed
I just found about this offer in Germany. A vendor called "one" is selling a low-cost laptop with Linux and OpenOffice.org pre-installed for 199 Euro. This special offer lasts until May 12th according to the website. Cool to see more and more hardware vendors bundle OpenOffice.org!
( Mai 08 2008, 06:32:36 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

New ODF API available
A new ODF API just became available. A first preview version of ODFDOM has just been released.
( Mai 08 2008, 01:56:13 PM CEST ) Permalink