You are currently browsing the SolidOffice weblog archives for August, 2005.
Dated August 30, the latest OpenOffice.org Newsletter is now online.
Registration has begun for the 2005 OpenOffice.org Conference in Slovenia, a number of large migration stories are included, NeoOffice/J gets a mention, and several reviews and newspaper endorsements are collected.
Direct downloads have passed 46,100,000.
Today marks the beta 2 release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. It’s available for download from the project website now.
Two sites are now collecting links to OpenOffice.org-related blogs:
The OpenOffice.org Newsletter is testing a new blog format. This is a great blog that has a very comprehensive and updated list of links to OOo-related information including articles, reviews, studies and more.
While 2.0 has not been released as a final candidate, the betas are quite good already. PCMag.com reviews OpenOffice 2.0 and its verdict is “Very Good.” (We already knew that.)
“If you can remember the name of OpenOffice.org, you can remember where to download it for no charge. If you tried the previous 1.1.4 version, the 2.0 beta version currently available will be a pleasant surprise. Unlike the slow, ugly, and underpowered earlier version, 2.0 is swift, smooth, and highly compatible with Office documents…”
“Anyone who doesn’t want to pay Microsoft’s premium prices for rarely used features may prefer this free suite. It does most everything that typical users need it to do, and does some things better than MS Office.”
The Participatory Culture Foundation is launching DTV, an internet TV broadcast framework roughly equivalent to iTunes, but for user-generated and distributed video. The current beta is available for Mac OS X, with other platforms to follow.
Newsforge publishes a tutorial on Hooking OOo to MySQL.
“Did you know that you can connect the OpenOffice.org office suite to a MySQL database? By combining the power of these two open source applications you can do things like generating personalized sales letters from the customer data stored on your servers. Let’s walk through the process using OOo’s database wizard.”
Paul Graham writes an excellent piece entitled, What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
He discusses the parallels between blogging and open source, positing that they are both manifestations of enthusiast culture.
“Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers.
More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.
But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them. Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use…”
I cannot help but jump to the conclusion:
“These, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.”
Newsforge portrays the migration of LA Gym Equipment from Windows to Linux. The process has been completed for servers, and soon all company desktops will also be running SUSE Linux, OpenOffice, and the rest of the free software stack. It was a smooth migration process with a large financial bonus for the organization.
“Making the switch to Linux has been good for network security and stability, but it’s been great for the bottom line, too. Scott says the company has saved at least $400,000 in licensing fees, upgrades, and new software purchases, as well as realizing payroll savings with reduced staff needs.”
Louis Suárez-Potts summarizes the past year’s work and prepares for the next in “Local Works.”
“Regardless of the regional, economic, and linguistic differences, there is a simple unanimity in perceiving free and open-source software like OpenOffice.org as the logical and even necessary strategy for this century. This is not blind optimism on my part. It has to do more with the rhetoric of government and the actions of businesses. Free software is gaining rapidly, OpenOffice.org in particular, and it is gaining in areas that were long seen as the stronghold of proprietary software (read: Microsoft): government, enterprises, education. What has made the difference?”