Donnerstag Juni 23, 2005
"Desktop Solution Powered by Sun Ray"
"End-users will see improved reliability of their systems as the Sun Ray thin client has no local disk drives or processors that could be points of failure. IT professionals will be pleased with the improved security of the integrated solution, as the SAVVIS utility allows for dynamic provisioning of firewalls and defense-in-depth architectures. All businesses can benefit from the unique economic model supporting the service, which requires no up-front capital expense, lowers operational costs, and significantly improves scalability."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 23 2005, 10:14:12 AM CEST )
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"Firm bets the time's finally right to chuck desktops"
"For a variable flat rate per user, Savvis is offering to swap desktop PCs for Sun's Sun Ray thin client devices and provide access to programs and file storage maintained in its centralized server operations. The service also utilizes Sun's Tarantella desktop software to support Microsoft's Windows applications and Sun's own StarOffice productivity tools."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 23 2005, 10:06:09 AM CEST )
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"NeoOffice/J 1.1 offers open-source Office alternative"
"Planamesa Software and the NeoOffice.org community have released NeoOffice/J 1.1, a Mac OS X-native version of the OpenOffice.org office suite that includes MS Office-compatible word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing applications."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 23 2005, 09:55:43 AM CEST )
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"OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Word"
"Conclusion
OOo Writer scores most of its victories in features that make the creation and maintenance of highly formatted or long documents easier. This pattern is not accidental. According to Elizabeth Mathias of Sun Microsystems, the documentation of OpenOffice.org has a long history of being written in Writer itself. As a result, the program's developers had the incentive to include the tools they needed. This legacy continues to give Writer advantages over competitors like Word.
That is not to say that Writer is a perfect program. Its interface is wildly inconsistent. Some features, notably cross-references, can most kindly be described as lacking. And in version 2.0, the attempt to imitate Microsoft Word hides several useful features.
Yet, despite these shortcomings, OOo Writer is not only as fully developed as Microsoft Word, but often superior in terms of features and stability.
Several years ago I concluded "Opening Up to OpenOffice.org" by saying, "OOo Writer outperforms Microsoft Word in almost every way." With the release of the version 2.0 beta, that statement is truer than ever. At its worst, OOo Writer is an adequate alternative for Microsoft Word. Most of the time, it is a superior one. And the greater your need for page design features or long document handling, the greater that superiority becomes."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 23 2005, 09:52:44 AM CEST )
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Montag Juni 20, 2005
Using AutoShapes via XML
Here is a great article that explains how to use CustomShapes (OpenOffice.org's/StarOffice's version of AutoShapes) via XML by leveraging the OASIS OpenDocument file format. Have fun with it! Oh, and thanks to J. David Eisenberg for writing the article!!!
( Jun 20 2005, 06:09:40 PM CEST )
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"First OpenSolaris derivative in the wild"
"Dubbed 'SchilliX' after its principal developer, veteran German open source programmer Jorg Schilling, the operating system has been in development for four months with the approval of Sun Microsystems. [...] SchilliX allows users to try out OpenSolaris for themselves without installing it to their hard disk, as it can be run directly from a CD-ROM. However, it can also be installed onto a hard disk or a sizeable USB storage device."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 20 2005, 04:26:20 PM CEST )
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"MS Office XML Formats Not OK with GNU"
""If they had any applicable patents, they'd most assuredly tell people what those patents are. I can't see that they have done that. So, all they've said is that they may have patents and, if they do, these are the terms under which they'll license them to you. While it is true the terms of such a license are GPL-incompatible, there is no need to comply with them until we are certain they have something that must be licensed," he said."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 20 2005, 04:21:57 PM CEST )
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OpenOffice.org at Tata Power
"However, there are multiple licences that fall under the ambit of open source. Having said that,
there are companies such as Tata Power that have gone for a ‘open source’ deployment. Avers Batliwala, “We are using OpenOffice.org and are shortly planning to upgrade to version 2.”"
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 20 2005, 04:13:12 PM CEST )
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Definition about "open"
This is a very interesting blog entry:
"I'd go back to the "discussion" in "relative discussion" and say open is:
(1) the degree to which the discourse (or discussion) over the final result is public and,
(2) the degree to which that final result is then open to unencumbered use.
[...]
Why should IT buyers insist that their vendors comply with open specifications? Interoperability is obviously a key benefit. But more importantly, when IT pros establish strategies that adhere to open standards (open specs that have made the transition), they put themselves in control of their IT, instead of vendors. As I've written before, if the proprietary nature of Microsoft Office's document formats and macro languages taught us anything, it's that we turned control of a certain part of our IT over to Microsoft. Once we invested so heavily in those proprietary items (to the point of no return), we put Microsoft in control of the security, performance, and cost of our IT. When Microsoft changed the licensing scheme to Office, what choice did we have but to go along? Well, if the OASIS Open Document Format existed at the time and Microsoft complied with it, we would have had a choice. A choice to go to OpenOffice, StarOffice, Wordperfect, LotusWorkplace, or any other software that supported it. If one of those offered better performance, lower total cost of ownership, or a more secure platform, then, through compliance, our ability to switch means that we're in control of those aspects of our IT, rather than the vendor."
( Jun 20 2005, 04:07:53 PM CEST )
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Freitag Juni 17, 2005
"Integrate Firefox with other tools"
"If you're moving over to Firefox from Mozilla, you've surely noticed how Firefox is built to be a sleeker, faster browsing engine. It accomplishes this in part by shedding all of its counterparts from the Mozilla Suite, including an email/news client, composer, and chat client. But that doesn't mean this functionality is no longer available. With a few extensions -- or with no work at all -- you can make Firefox integrate with your email client as though it were still part of a suite. You don't have to stop there, either; at least one valuable extension gives you the power to connect Firefox with virtually any program on your system."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 17 2005, 11:27:02 AM CEST )
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The ServerWatch on OpenSolaris
"The Fedora-feeding-the-enterprise model didn't quite work as Red Hat envisioned it, but it lacked one vital piece of the puzzle that Sun already has in place. Sun is selling a full system stack, unlike Red Hat, whose business model hinges on selling support. In other words, Sun hopes that giving away the appetizer will lead to the customer sticking around for the meal."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 17 2005, 11:23:30 AM CEST )
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Donnerstag Juni 16, 2005
"Specification Proliferation"
"Other kinds of standardization work can be thought of as separative efforts, in effect saying, "The existing stuff isn't good enough, so we need this..." or, "Sometimes, general purpose is too general." The push for a binary variant of XML is a good example of this kind of thinking. Arguably, so are the XML formats recently announced for Microsoft Office 12, some of the work from the WHAT WG, and the alphabet soup of overlapping Web Services standards. Developers have learned to have healthy skepticism for these things. Just as we have seen with licensing, often the need for forking has been overstated, and attaching to current, ongoing work is the better strategy. For anyone evaluating the worth of a particular standard, I suggest that the same three criteria adopted by OSI make a good touchstone for a potential standard:
1. It shouldn't be duplicative of another more-established standard.
2. It should be clearly written and easy to understand.
3. It should reuse existing standards instead of reinventing things."
I only remember XML being mentioned as a reused standard in Microsoft's recent XML file format announcement. OASIS OpenDocument on the other hand reuses quite a few existing open standards in addition to XML, e.g. HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and the Dublin Core.
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 16 2005, 05:31:56 AM CEST )
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Mittwoch Juni 15, 2005
JavaOne: StarOffice Software Integration
My colleague Stefan Schneider who works at Sun's SAP Competence Center in Walldorf just made me aware of this JavaOne hands-on lab. ISV's should be particularly interested in this lab.
( Jun 15 2005, 05:29:15 PM CEST )
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OpenOffice.org in Singapore
"In Singapore, the adoption of the Open Office suite of office applications by the Ministry of Defence (Mindef) represents one of the major open source case studies in recent months. The Mindef CIO Office is targeting to equip more than 20,000 Mindef/SAF users with OpenOffice by the end of FY05."
The full article can be found here.
( Jun 15 2005, 12:16:27 PM CEST )
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Microsoft trying to defend their XML format
I just found this blog entry by Brian Jones. Apparently Microsoft, or at least Brian Jones, is trying to defend their XML format. I really wanted to comment on this myself, until I realized that about everything has already been said in the comments to Brian's blog. Here are a few extracts:
"as far as I know both OpenOffice and the OpenDocument-Folks are an open group. You could have talked to them about your problems with the format and I suppose the would have helped you.
StarOffice/OpenOffice has also many customers that are using all the different versions and features but they've managed to integrate it with the new format. The real problem is NOT the format."
"Please don´t blame OASIS and the OpenDocument file format not to be able to not represent Microsofts features. OASIS welcomed every entity to help in the process of defining what is now know as the OpenDocument file format. [...] OASIS welcomed others to help in defining what is known now as the OpenDocument file format so their features can be represented in this file format."
"Brian, while it's true that MS Office and OpenOffice.org will differ on features, it's also understood that most people only use a small subset of the features available. Does Microsoft have to have 100% feature compatibility before they will support the OpenDocument format? I argue that there is no need. You support the features that you can and you ignore the rest. It's not like these features will make the document not readable."
I would have to study both file formats in detail to provide evidence to my following statements, but I'm personally convinced that Microsoft could adopt the OASIS OpenDocument format if they really wanted to!
As someone else already pointed out, most people do not use every feature that an office suite provides. However, almost all office suites have a common set of features that covers the features most frequently used by users. Since the OASIS OpenDocument will be supported (AFAIK) by OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, AbiWord and TextMaker, thus completely different office applications, I do not see a reason why Microsoft could not have used the OASIS OpenDocument file format, at least for the common set of features.
For the remaining Microsoft-only features, which are probably less relevant to most users, Microsoft could have worked with the OASIS OpenDocument technical committee to get the necessary changes added to the OpenDocument format specification. This is exactly what the KOffice folks successfully did!
If I was a Microsoft customer, I would put more pressure on the company to support a truly open format that is supported by multiple vendors, is not controlled by just one entity, and evolves in an open process. Yes, as a Microsoft customer I could simply use the new Microsoft format, but then I'm again stuck with a more or less proprietary format for the next ten to twenty years. Microsoft Office 12 is still about one year out. Thus, now is the time to make sure that Microsoft does the right thing!
( Jun 15 2005, 08:30:02 AM CEST )
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