August 27th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
O3Spaces is a companion tool for OpenOffice.org users in need of collaboration space.
Offering document management and collaboration, it competes with programs like Alfresco and Sharepoint. O3Spaces focuses on interoperability with OpenOffice.org as well as Microsoft Office and StarOffice, but has focused on OOo first and foremost.
Free community versions of O3Spaces are available. (Packaged product versions, and support subscriptions are also available, as revenue sources which provide the company’s business model.)
Posted in OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
August 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Metamorphosis, based in Macedonia, announces that Poland’s Ministry of Education recommends open source software for the country’s schools. As one of the more populous members of the EU with over 40 million people, this could have a big impact!
In addition to general support of open source, the Ministry also specifically recommended OpenOffice.org:
“The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”
This recommendation is the culmination of a 10-month project in which 99 schools and over 4,500 students were introduced to FOSS by volunteer members of the Free and Open Software in Schools campaign.
“About 30 percent of the schools visited by the Wioo w Szkole [Free and Open Software in Schools] campaign have switched at least partly to Open Source. Most of these schools configured their PCs to run a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, alongside Windows.”
More information is available at the Open Source Observatory website.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Poland’s Ministry of Education Recommends Open Source
August 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Tom’s Guide offers a visual tip collection for OpenOffice 2 and 3.
They noticed something we have long been keeping an eye out for: the early mainstream beginning to adopt OOo.
“We’ve talked up OpenOffice before in other articles, but the software is worth a closer look since more and more companies are beginning to dole it out to employees.”
The premise of the article is to support new OOo users: “Here, we’ll show you some simple tips and tricks so that you can use OpenOffice in the easiest and most efficient way possible. All the information that we’ve included works just as well on OpenOffice 2 as it does on the new beta 3 version. It’s straightforward and easy — we promise.”
Using 20 screenshots and a short descriptive text for each, Tom’s Guide covers lots of basic functionality and helps new users get accustomed to the software. It will make a good reference to help the coming waves of new users get comfortable on their new suite.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
August 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Open Malaysia Blog announces a major OpenOffice migration: the Malaysian state of Pahang will move all its computers to OpenOffice.
“The driving force for this migration seems to be cost of proprietary software and the fear of unlicensed software. OpenOffice.org is the obvious solution to these two pressing problems (thanks, BSA!) What is good is that they have chosen ODF by default, and they are not changing the file format to the binary proprietary ones.
“What is interesting is that the public sector in Malaysia is moving towards FOSS independently from any government directive or mandate, so no amount of whining would derail our government from choosing and making their choice. Its a simple business decision, and the market has decided.”
Nowhere could I find how many computers will be involved or other details, but this is yet another promising development in Malaysia, which seems to be growing into an open source stronghold year by year.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Malaysian State of Pahang Adopts OpenOffice.org
August 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
I love to see the cross-pollination of ideas between open source projects, and the clever ways they can be adapted from one paradigm to another.
For example, recent versions of OpenOffice.org have become more like web browsers, especially Firefox, as OOo introduced its Extensions features, as developers have worked to provide wiki-capabilities, and now, as a new extension called Last Session allows you to reopen OOo and have all your previous documents open for you with one click, just like I’ve become accustomed to with Firefox’s session restore.
Last Session is something I had a distinct need for, and I look forward to making good use of it starting immediately.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Extensions: Last Session
July 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice has won in three categories at the Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards!
This puts it far ahead of any other single project, reflecting the open source community’s understanding of the strategic importance of an open source, open standards-based office suite. This product category, after all, is where Microsoft continues to earn billions of dollars it funnels into attacks on every other open source program and project, as well as stymieing efforts to create true open standards and level playing fields.
Before I get carried away, what were the three categories? They were: Best Project, Best Project for the Enterprise, and Best Project for Educators.
I would have to agree!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Wins Three Sourceforge Awards
July 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Hehe2.net writes a preview of new OOo features in OpenOffice.org 3.0: What to Expect?
The features it covers are probably well-known to readers of this blog, but it includes good screenshots and a great deal of enthusiasm (using far more exclamation points than even I do):
“If you thought 2.4 was major release, then you have seen nothing! Come September, OpenOffice.org will release it’s 3.0 version! That must be quite a big jump!”
The author likes multiple-pages view, the new notes feature, Mac OS X support, Calc’s user interface improvements, tables in Impress, PDF import, and the Presenter Screen extension.
As I, the author is quite pleased with this upgrade:
“OpenOffice 3.0 is a major milestone for the project, there are tons of other new features. I also noticed a great improvement in speed, which has always a bane in previous OpenOffice.org versions.
“If you can’t wait until September, why don’t you download the beta version and try it out, so far it has been very much stable for me. You can download OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta here.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Another OpenOffice 3.0 Preview
July 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
With plenty of beta releases over a long testing cycle, we can expect a polished and stable OpenOffice.org 3.0 this September.
GullFOSS announces OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2 was released yesterday.
You can download it for testing here.
I’ve been using the earlier beta with great success on my Mac and some Windows boxes. It seems about ready for primetime use already.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice 3.0 Beta 2
June 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Combining two of my interests, Kay Ramme of Sun has created “ODF@WWW,” an ODF Wiki. It includes some of the capabilities I had envisioned in my post about an OpenOffice wiki extension, and adds some cool new ideas of Ramme’s own.
Thinking about the rich editing ability of OpenOffice, and the lightweight collaboration of a wiki, Ramme “understood that these two approaches may be married to become an “ODF Wiki”, combing their strengths – simple editing and simple publishing – while eliminating their weaknesses…”
He jumped right into the project: “I installed an Apache webserver, enabled WebDAV, did some (hacky) bash scripting, and got the following.”
It’s a great start, and I am looking forward to what Ramme develops next with this project.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | Comments Off on ODF Wiki
June 24th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Frank Mau observes a rapid increase in downloads of OpenOffice.org. He writes, “Looking back on our last download numbers we can see them increasing version by version. We grew over 20% from Version 2.3.1 to 2.4.0. Now the 2.4.1 started and it looks good to beat our own record.”
He credits the quality of the software, and the new, more easily navigated website as major reasons for this increase.
“OpenOffice.org is a good product, for free and localized in many languages. We have extensions to extend office functionality if needed…
“Another factor is the one-download-click that enables the user to get the download starting with one-click from the homepage or the download main-page. In numbers, before we started with the one-click and the redesign of the pages 10% of visitors started a download of OpenOffice.org after visiting the homepage. After the introduction of the one-click and the other web-changes 20%.”
I’d add that OpenOffice is approaching a tipping point. More and more users are telling their friends, requesting it at work, or even standardizing on OOo across their entire company. This creates significant knock-on effects and substantial longterm growth.
With the upcoming release of version 3.0 (beta available now for testing) that includes a native version for Mac OS X, I expect these numbers to reach yet another plateau.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Download Boom