Samstag September 29, 2007

Check out the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository
You should check out the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository. I'm impressed! The repository has been online for just a few days now, but new extensions seem to be coming in at a nice rate. If you want to develop your own extensions, you should check out the OpenOffice.org Conference presentations.
( Sep 29 2007, 02:45:32 PM CEST ) Permalink

Freitag September 28, 2007

New ODF organization being founded in the Netherlands
A new ODF organization, the OpenDoc Society, is being founded in the Netherlands. According to this Dutch article, the new organization has already support from 25 organizations. The Dutch homepage of the OpenDoc Society can be found here.
( Sep 28 2007, 06:32:42 PM CEST ) Permalink

Vietnam meets Extremadura to learn about open source
I just came across this Spanish article. Apparently the Vietnamese government met with people from Extremadura (Spain) in order to exchange ideas and experiences around the adoption of open source. It's great to see governments start their own kind of "community building"! BTW, more information about Extremadura's open source efforts can be found in this video.

In this context, it's amazing to see how many people from different French ministries and other government agencies are actively participating in the French OpenOffice.org mailing lists and helping each other. You see domain names like equipement.gouv.fr, interieur.gouv.fr, culture.gouv.fr, douane.finances.gouv.fr, finances.gouv.fr, cotes-darmor.pref.gouv.fr, dgi.finances.gouv.fr, justice.gouv.fr, and hautes-pyrenees.pref.gouv.fr. It's no surprise that according to the OpenOffice.org user survey, France has the second largest OpenOffice.org user community. (Disclaimer: The survey is currently only available in English, French and German.)
( Sep 28 2007, 01:23:33 PM CEST ) Permalink

20,000 OpenOffice.org seats in Vietnam
Here is another OpenOffice.org success story:
"More than 20,000 computers used at Party agencies nationwide will replace Microsoft Office software with OpenOffice open source office software.
... Cost savings is only one of the reasons for this change. The major target of the replacement is to improve the ability of the Vietnamese IT circle because the use of open source products like OpenOffice will create a new market for Vietnamese IT companies, according to Mr. Loi."
The full article can be found here. Seeing all the OpenOffice.org and ODF success stories coming in and having read this Forrester report yesterday, I guess the current market leader is getting under more and more pressure. When we talk about 90% market share today, we only talk about 1 Billion PC's, ignoring the majority of the world's population that does not have a computer, yet. I'm sure interesting times are coming up!
( Sep 28 2007, 12:54:18 PM CEST ) Permalink

City of Amsterdam ready to switch to OpenOffice.org
According to this Dutch article, the City of Amsterdam is ready to switch to OpenOffice.org and Linux based on a pilot. The decision about the migration is expected for December. According to the Article the test users had no problems using OpenOffice.org because of its familiar user interface. Since my Dutch is a bit "rusty", please let me know if my summary is correct! Anyway, great news!
( Sep 28 2007, 12:13:09 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Donnerstag September 27, 2007

Growing interest in Sun's x86 servers
I'm more of a software guy, but being a Sun employee, it still feels good to read more and more positive articles about our servers in the press. This one is a good example. The headline is "It's time to pay attention to Sun's x86 server biz".
( Sep 27 2007, 12:12:28 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

OpenOffice.org case studies and solutions
I frequently get asked about OpenOffice.org case studies and solutions. If you are interested in that kind of information as well or if you can even contribute case studies, please check out the OpenOffice.org Market Share Analysis wiki page and the OpenOffice.org Solutions wiki page.
( Sep 27 2007, 09:51:03 AM CEST ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org on 180,000 seats in Macedonia
Here are great news out of the Republic of Macedonia:
"When completed, Macedonia's Computer for Every Child initiative will have deployed approximately 160,000 NComputing virtual PC terminals and 20,000 NComputing enabled PCs (which each also support a student on the attached monitor) running Ubuntu. Besides Ubuntu 7.04, each NComputing server/PC comes with NComputing's Terminal Server software and OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, and Wine."
The full article can be found here.
( Sep 27 2007, 09:45:58 AM CEST ) Permalink

Mittwoch September 26, 2007

ODF Camp at OOoCon 2007 was a success
As Rob Weir reports in his blog, there was an ODF Camp at OOoCon 2007 led by Rob which focussed on interoperability between different ODF implementations. Unfortunately, I had to leave the ODF Camp for a few hours due to customer meetings, but from my point of view the ODF Camp was a huge success. The ODF Camp was the very first event of this kind so far and therefore nobody knew exactly how to best approach the issue, but I think everybody got a much better understanding of the different aspects related to interoperability. People agreed, that there should be more events like the ODF Camp at OOoCon 2007 going forward. What I found particularly interesting was, that the different vendors/projects chose different approaches to implement the test documents. In one case, someone realized an indentation via additional spaces. In another case, someone typed in list numbers directly, i.e. hard coded them instead of using a built-in numbering feature. These "user errors" led to minor interoperability issues between the different ODF applications.

Sure, you can say those are stupid errors and thus are unlikely to occur. However, I believe that many "bad documents" including many "bad macros" are produced simply because most people were never trained to correctly use an office suite. All these "user errors" contribute to the interoperability problem.

My favorite example of a "bad document" is one that I saw when I was in my first professional job working in the IT department of a large German furniture manufacturer. Someone from a sales department called me and said that his document breaks completely as soon as he changes two words to a bold face. I could not believe it and thus went upstairs in order to take a look at the issue myself. I also changed the two words to bold and, he was right, the whole document fell apart. For a few seconds I was wondering what was going on. Then I switched on the "view nonprinting characters" feature. There was the problem. The whole document, yes, the whole document, was just one single line of text. Everything including line breaks and tables were implemented using spaces. Thus, for sure, once one part of the document was modified, everything else fell apart.

This is probably a very extreme case, but it shows how people not really knowing how to use an office suite can contribute to "bad documents", which leads me to a different topic. When people think about training costs associated with a migration to an alternative office suite like OpenOffice.org they think about them as "sunk costs", i.e. the training does not provide any real benefit, but just makes users capable of doing the same things with another piece of software.

Based on customer feedback I can say that this is often not true. The migration trainings are often the very first real office productivity training that users get in their lives and thus become much more productive even though the new software might have a lower total number of features. People who have gone through a migration training are much less likely to create documents that consist of just one very long line of text where tables and line breaks are implemented via additional spaces.
( Sep 26 2007, 12:29:40 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

OOoCon Pictures by Florian Effenberger
Florian Effenberger, co-lead of the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project, just published his OOoCon pictures. You can find them here. I still have to upload mine, but I have to admit that I only took a very few pictures in the end. I obviously spend too much time talking to other community members. It's always a lot of fun to meet everybody face-to-face!
( Sep 26 2007, 12:01:26 PM CEST ) Permalink

Mittwoch September 19, 2007

"OpenOffice.org Free Software Proves a Success at WalMart"
Here are more cool OpenOffice.org news:
"Conference delegates watched a message from John Lin, General Manager, Everex: "On July 18th 2007, Everex launched its first 'Back to School' PC with OpenOffice.org 2.02 into WalMart stores throughout the United States. The response was fantastic. Not only did Everex receive rave reviews in the media, but consumer interest resulted in a three-fold increase in web traffic to everex.com. Feedback from WalMart was also very positive: they have requested all our future units include OpenOffice.org productivity software. Everex would like to thank everyone involved in OpenOffice.org for their help and support, and congratulations again for providing the world with such a wonderful product.""
The full press release can be found here.
( Sep 19 2007, 09:47:49 AM CEST ) Permalink

The OpenOffice.org Conference in Barcelona just started
The OpenOffice.org Conference in Barcelona just started. I'll upload my first pictures later, but I can say that the university building, i.e. the conference venue, is very impressive! The first pictures are already available on Flickr, and I'm sure that more will be added over the next few days.

All the people who cannot attend the conference in person should check out the conference website and the OOoCon page by kiberpipa. Like in previous years, kiberpipa will provide video streams of all the sessions and the slides will be published on the conference website. I hope you'll enjoy the conference, even if you can't be in the warm and sunny city of Barcelona!
( Sep 19 2007, 09:37:50 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Montag September 17, 2007

My new hobbies: bats and golf
I always had the strangest mixes of hobbies. Thus, my newest hobbies fit very nicely into that list. Recently my wife and I both took a golf class in order to learn playing golf and in order to get the "license" that is needed in Germany in order to be allowed to play on a real golf course. The one-week class was a lot of fun, even though my joints are still aching. I hope the pain will go away quickly, so that I can give in to my new addiction.

Another new hobby - and the one that actually makes my list of hobbies strange - is bats. I was always very interested in nature, but in the past I was more into bird watching. I even managed to get my wife addicted to bird watching as well. Recently my wife and I attended a few guided tours where we were introduced to the local bat species via ultra-sound / bat detectors. Since my wife and I wanted to learn more about bats and in order to get a chance to see them from closer by, we both volunteered to help with "cleaning up" the "houses" of the endangered species. On this picture you can see how we checked the "houses". It was a lot of fun! Being in nature is always fun! And that we got pretty close to the bats via our "housekeeping work" becomes obvious in the following pictures that I took with my little camera:








BTW, this one is NOT dead! It only pretends to be dead!


( Sep 17 2007, 07:25:04 PM CEST ) Permalink

ODF Alliance has now about 450 members from 53 countries!
Wow! I just heard that the ODF Alliance has now about 450 members from 53 countries. The support for ODF is definitely growing world wide.
( Sep 17 2007, 06:53:44 PM CEST ) Permalink

The Netherlands adopt ODF
It's a great day for ODF! The Netherlands just decided to adopt ODF. I'm only aware of details available in Dutch so far, but the key information about this information can be found on this web page and in this PDF file. Here is a quote (Dutch) from the PDF file:

"stapsgewijze invoering van de open standaard ODF (Open Document Format) voor het lezen, schrijven, uitwisselen, publiceren en ontvangen van documenten (uiterlijk januari 2009 door alle ministeries en mede-overheden ondersteund) op weg naar grootschalig gebruik van open document formaten voor overheidstoepassingen."

Thus, ODF will be introduced step by step for reading, writing, exchanging and publishing document, and by 2009 all ministries should support ODF. Again, great news!
( Sep 17 2007, 06:39:53 PM CEST ) Permalink