March 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
For the past few years, Malaysia has been on the forefront of the ODF-MSOOXML struggle as well as the OpenOffice.org-Microsoft Office competition. However, bit by bit they have been moving in the direction of the open source camp.
A recent press release informs us that a Malaysian government agency has chosen to migrate to OpenOffice, in “MAMPU Migrates to OpenOffice.org.”
Quoting the entire short press release:
“The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), today officially adopts a policy to migrate to the OpenOffice.org open source productivity suite. This is in line with the Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Master Plan, which calls for government agencies to reduce costs, increase freedom of choice and interoperability.
“From April 1st, MAMPU will start adopting the OpenDocument Format (ODF), standard for all new documents created. ODF, the ISO open standard for electronic documents, is also the default format for OpenOffice.org. The agency will also uninstall all copies of Microsoft Office by the end of 2008.
“To ensure a smooth migration, presently over 80 agency staff have been trained by the Open Source Competency Centre (OSCC). Additional staff will then be trained internally by the IT department, which will also provide support for OpenOffice.org.”
Combined with a strong presence in Singapore and the Philippines, and a recent 20,000-seat government migration in Vietnam, it appears that Southeast Asia is quickly becoming a major stronghold of the OpenDocument Format and OpenOffice.org itself.
Edit: The Open Malaysia blog covers this story with greater detail.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Adoption in Malaysia
March 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Thanks to a recent comment on an earlier post here, and a mention on Erwin Tenhumberg’s blog, I’ve found OOo Ninja’s post of screenshots from OpenOffice.org 3.0 Alpha.
Some great features are due to arrive in this release toward the end of the year. They include an upgraded notes feature (with display in the margin), side-by-side page view options, an improved user interface theme for Calc, native table support in Impress, and the native Mac version!
Erwin also mentions in his blog the download rate of OOo has reached 1 million per week, an astronomical number that even still does not represent the total number of users, since many will get their copy from other repositories, Linux distributions, CDs, or pre-installed with a new computer.
Posted in Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 3 Comments »
March 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Beijing won by a landslide in voting for 2008’s OpenOffice.org Conference location, Willy Sudiarto Raharjo reports (based on an email from John McCreesh).
This is the first OOoCon to be held outside of Europe, and reflects the rapidly-growing OOo community in China.
Beijing RedFlag 2000 is the local representative for the bid, and Peter Junge was the co-lead managing the process. Their influence in the Chinese software market is large, and this conference should help show the world how OOo and ODF-based applications are succeeding in the PRC.
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Conference 2008: Beijing
March 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice.org and Alfresco can be used together for powerful Enterprise Content Management. Erwin Tenhumberg points out a handy new OpenOffice Extension that provides deeper integration between the two applications called the “OpenOffice.org Plugin for Alfresco.”
While rereading parts of Alfresco’s site, I found the latest release of “Alfresco’s Open Source Barometer Survey.” Of particular interest is their findings for office suites (among an admittedly self-selected sample of users): “When it comes to content it comes from Microsoft Office. However, users in Germany and France are twice as likely to use OpenOffice than in the US or UK. Microsoft Office 66%, OpenOffice 24%.”
This is the highest usage share I’ve yet seen for OOo, but it keeps growing everywhere and every time I look.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice + Alfresco = Crazy Delicious
March 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The news first arrived last week that OpenOffice.org will adopt LGPLv3 as of OOo 3.0 beta.
This change and some other improvements are described in Simon Phipp’s post linked above.
He explains: “OpenOffice.org’s license will change to LGPLv3 as part of a broader set of changes intended to improve the OpenOffice.org community for everyone. Those changes also include a switch to the latest version of the standard Sun contributor agreement, with an addendum specifically tailored to the needs of the OpenOffice.org community. There’s increased latitude for documentation writers to publish their work on OpenOffice.org. And in future, plugins for OpenOffice.org may host their source code directly on the community site without copyright being shared, helping collaboration within the community.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org to Adopt LGPLv3 License
March 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is coming this fall, and many people are already starting to get excited about it. VentureCake is excited about its PDF import, native Mac OS X Aqua interface, and more:
“We love OpenOffice.org, hereby referred to as OpenOffice like normal people do. We like the fact it does pretty much everything we need for free, we like the out-of-the box PDF and Flash support, its better-than-Word ability to work with large documents, and the joys of using a standard file format that’s actually, you know, a standard.”
The article lists a boatload of planned new features that will be really cool, including the PIM (Thunderbird + Sunbird), support for saving files in wiki syntax (MediaWiki is already supported), hybrid PDFs, and others.
Hybrid PDFs in particular seem interesting. VentureCake states “The whole Openoffice suite can save ‘hybrid’ PDF documents that can be viewed as PDFs or edited as OpenDocument files.” This should bring even greater compatibility to the suite and make it much easier to work with companies still using legacy applications like Microsoft Office…
Finally, the extensions user experience will be upgraded to make it feel much more like Firefox’s, which I think will make it far more popular among OOo users.
This is going to be a major upgrade, possibly as significant as the move from 1.x to 2.0, and it should bring legions of new users along with it.
Posted in Mac, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | 3 Comments »
February 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Solveig Haugland, OpenOffice.org author and trainer, has written Switching Office Suites from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org for Fanatic Attack.
She covers the technical and social aspects of making the change, using techniques she has learned from helping many companies around the USA over the last several years.
In this article, she focuses on the essentials; her goal is to “give you what you need to make getting to know OpenOffice.org easier. I can give you settings to apply that will keep you from having problems in the first place. Not all of them, of course, but with a limited amount of information on how to set up the program, I can help you have a smoother, more enjoyable experience with the program. So that’s what this is: setting up OpenOffice.org to make it work for you.”
Posted in OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Solveig Haugland on Switching from Microsoft to OpenOffice
February 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ian Lynch, creator of the INGOTs, recently emailed one of the OpenOffice.org mailing lists to give a little update on the project.
INGOTs stands for “International Grades – Open Technologies” and describes itself as “qualifications designed to motivate students and reduce administration through innovative use of the internet. Ingots are accredited in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”
By encouraging students to participate in web 2.0 communities, the INGOTs helps them learn new software skills, as well as the ability to be self-directed in their learning experiences, something extremely valuable in a field with the innovation and rapid change of internet software and open source tools. On top of this, the students receive accreditation that can be used toward their school requirements.
Lynch’s latest email alerted us to student blogs about learning and teaching younger students OpenOffice skills. This demonstrates the project functioning as a self-sustaining community, as well as reinforcing students’ learning process as they go on to share it with others.
And building a business on top of open source software helps expand the software’s community as well as make an ongoing living for the business. It’s a great project, and I am glad to see it thriving.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Students Blogging about OpenOffice
February 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
FOSDEM, in Brussels, EU, is a huge and important annual open source conference happening this weekend. According to its site, “FOSDEM ’08 is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet.”
OpenOffice.org is at FOSDEM with a developer room for hacking, and plenty of coders and others to represent it and work together on projects small and large. It’s a great opportunity to start or increase your involvement with the OOo project.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org at FOSDEM
February 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
A few old news articles that I’d nevertheless like to catalog here today:
InformationWeek writes, in mid-January, of Lenovo preinstalling Linux:
“Starting Jan. 14, the T61 and R16 Centrino ThinkPads will have the option of shipping with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, with OpenOffice.org included. A news item over at DesktopLinux.com revealed that the T61 will sport a Core 2 Duo T7205 2.0-GHz processor, 1 Gbyte of DDR2 RAM, an 80-Gbyte 5400 RPM hard drive — all for $949.” (Incidentally, choosing Linux will save a buyer $20 over Windows on the same hardware.)
Erwin Tenhumberg writes a status report on ODF that he titles “Dispelling Myths Around ODF.”
A very thorough article that debunks some of the FUD Microsoft has been spreading around ODF (though personally, I have not seen as much MS FUD as I expected–maybe their energy isn’t what it once was).
My favorite section is where Erwin lists some of the prominent applications that use ODF as their default, or one of their primary, formats. These include KOffice, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, Corel WordPerfect, Apple TextEdit, Google Docs, and plenty more.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »