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NeoOffice Resources Roundup

December 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst

Recently, I’ve been in contact with an Ohio school district through an educational technology mailing list. The district has migrated to NeoOffice on all its computers (Macs, of course), but did not implement training or documentation for the new users. Thus, they have had some frustrations with the migration.

I sent the following in an email to give them the resources they need to get comfortable with their new software, and I’m posting it here in case it is useful for others in a similar situation:

I’m happy to help you find the NeoOffice (and related OpenOffice) online communities. Without participating in these, or without any training to accompany the switch, I can see why you and your colleagues would be frustrated! I hope I can help you all cross over the transition period to smooth sailing beyond.

For manuals, I suggest Solveig Haugland’s and the OOoAuthors Project’s manuals.

Solveig’s blog offers useful tips every day: http://www.openoffice.blogs.com/
Her book is called “OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook” and is the definitive reference on the software: http://openoffice.blogs.com/bookresources/

OOoAuthors is a group of volunteers who have written a plethora of great books on the OpenOffice component applications. You can download any of them free as PDFs, or you can purchase the printed books from Lulu.com for a reasonable price. Links to all of these can be found on the site’s homepage: http://oooauthors.org/en

For online resources, NeoOffice maintains a user forum and a wiki where you can ask specific questions of the many users and volunteers who participate there.

NeoOffice Forums: http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums
NeoOffice Wiki: http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Main_Page

OpenOffice has its own official forum as well. Since the two programs are very similar in most functionality, you can also ask questions of the site users there:

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/

In reviewing it just now, I came across the following thread that should be particularly useful for you: http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11660

The books above should provide the step-by-step instructions for specific tasks. If you need more, then any book about OpenOffice should suffice, and you can also look into The INGOTS online training and certification program, at www.theingots.org, for online training materials (accredited in the UK, but quite useful here in the USA too).

Good luck, and let me know if you have further questions!

Foswiki Arrives

November 26th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

After a rift in the TWiki project led to a fork, the new version has chosen its name and formally launched as Foswiki, for “Free and Open Source Wiki.

Foswiki’s project goals are:

  • “Foswiki promises new (and long-awaited) features, while maintaining a clear upgrade path for existing TWiki installations.
  • Foswiki is an open-source project, publishing its work under the GNU General Public License.
  • The Foswiki community is dedicated to democratic governance, free of commercial influence and trademark issues.
  • We want our marketing finally to live up with our product and be as good.”

I am looking forward to continued Foswiki growth, and I anticipate it will remain an excellent wiki for both intranet and internet use cases.

Norway to Fund Open Source Implementation

November 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

The government of Norway has committed $285,000 to encourage and implement OpenOffice.org in government offices, reports OStatic:

“Minister of Government Adminstration and Reform Heidi Grande Roeys is granting 2 million kroner ($285,000) to the national center for free software, and the terms of the deal are interesting. Instead of general promotion of open source software, the funds are specifically earmarked for adopting and promoting use of the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications in government offices.”

The longterm goal is to increase competition in the office productivity suite space. This grant’s purpose is to fill the gaps in connecting OOo with third-party applications, so that it can compete head-to-head with the Norwegian government’s current deployment of Microsoft Office. Further, by displacing the need to purchase as many licenses for MS Office, this grant will pay for itself in a short time.

Spicebird 0.7 Released

November 24th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

Spicebird, the new open source personal information manager developed on top of Thunderbird’s email, calendar and contact infrastructure, has released version 0.7 over the weekend. (See the Spicebird 0.7 Release Notes.)

From the release announcement: “Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and integration among its components.”

One feature of particular interest is Spiceboard’s Home screen, which lets you install iGoogle Gadgets to use it as a dashboard to the web. Brilliant idea, and one I have adopted for the OpenOffice.org Dashboard concept under development as well.

Download Spicebird for Linux and Windows here. (Where’s the Mac version?)

OpenOffice.org Dashboard Concept

November 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

For the past few weeks I’ve been developing an idea to extend OpenOffice.org 3.0’s Welcome Screen into a more complete Dashboard concept. The idea sprung from Google Chrome‘s new tab screen, Spicebird‘s Home screen, and the social software ideas being developed as KDE’s Open Collaboration Services.

Yesterday I uploaded (well, Alexandro did it for me) a mockup to the OOo Wiki in order to share my OpenOffice.org Dashboard concept for further discussion. I have some plans to improve the current mockup, and will attach an ODG to the page to make it easier for others to illustrate ideas to build on top of what I have started.

If you’re interested, please check out the page and provide some feedback.

I think this Dashboard idea fits well with our plans to make OpenOffice feel more modern, configurable, and social, so let’s see what the community can do with this!

High Priority Free Software Projects

November 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

The Free Software Foundation maintains a list of High Priority Free Software Projects, where it has identified important technologies that need a free software implementation or need greater community support for an existing implementation.

As the key ideological driver of Free Software, the FSF plays an important role in its continuing development and also to keep it true to its roots. The intention with this project is to make sure no choke points develop in which the internet or the free software world can be controlled by proprietary and closed products.

From the project’s page:

“Our list helps guide volunteers and supporters to projects where their skills can be utilized, whether they be in coding, graphic design, writing, or activism. We hope that you can find a project here where your skill, energy, and time can be put to good use.

“Some of the most important projects on our list are replacement projects. These projects are important because they address areas where users are continually being seduced into using non-free software by the lack of an adequate free replacement.”

Open Source Social Networking: The Open Mesh

November 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

With Appleseed, Elgg, Mugshot, BuddyPress and others, I’m seeing a lot of development activity around open source social networking.

Following this back to Appleseed, the very first attempt at an open source social networking platform that I personally discovered, brought me to a post on Marc’s Voice blog titled “How to Build the Open Mesh.”

A broad treatise on the subject and a strategic map, the linked post is actually a table of contents to ten detailed chapters on the topic:

“I have created a series of blog posts which attempts to map out many of the issues, constructs, technologies and standards required to build out the open mesh.

“Each post has a chart showing how the particular area I’m focusing on – looks vis a vis one’s ID and profile record. Then I started to imagine what these charts would look like – overlaid on top of each other.

“Each one of the posts maps out who the major players are, who are the dudes and dudesses down in the trenches doing the work and how do I see all these areas meshing together.

“So here is the Table of Content on the series. Please send me any input, feedback, corrections, additional names and players and lets all build the open mesh – together.”

When people talk about “Web3.0,” I imagine this is what they mean. Not just the read/write web, not just a giant semantic database like the Semantic Web, but rather the combination of both those things with a layer of personal human data and relationship graphs. It’s huge, fascinating, and will keep us busy for the next decade or more.

BuddyPress: Open Source Social Networking

November 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

BuddyPress is a collection of plugins for WordPress Multi-User edition that provides social profiles and networking features. Users, groups, blogs, activity, friends, and all the normal features are included, with a very clean user interface.

A BuddyPress test site is online to let interested parties see how it works in action. (It even includes a group interested in open source social networking, including competitors like Elgg and others, which is cool.)

Just as WordPress itself brought open source blogging to the mainstream, it looks like BuddyPress could do the same for distributed, open source social networking. This will be a fascinating, innovative, and in my mind, long-awaited development.

ODF Templates from IBM

November 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

IBM’s Lotus Symphony was developed based on OpenOffice.org’s codebase and uses the same ODF (OpenDocument Format) as its standard file format.

To help users create attractive documents, IBM has released a number of ODF file templates for things like schedules, invoices, budgets, memos, letters and presentations. While promoted on Symphony’s website, these standard ODF files can be used in any compatible software suite, including OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, KOffice and many others.

Download and enjoy!

OOo: 5 Million Downloads in Two Weeks

November 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst

After reaching the 3 million mark in its first week, OpenOffice.org 3.0 exceeded 5 million downloads after two weeks, announces Meall Dubh.

5,290,166 to be exact. 83.8% of them for Windows, with a very strong showing for Mac and Linux (despite the fact that most Linux users get OOo from the built-in package managers, and lots of Mac users already run NeoOffice).

Another week has elapsed since these numbers were collected, so it will be interesting to see where the weekly download plateau ultimately settles.