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