December 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Eric Bachard has been capably leading the rebirth of the OpenOffice.org Education Project, signing up universities in North America and Europe to teach programming and project collaboration by participating directly in OpenOffice itself. His most recent success has been to bring Ecole Centrale Nantes onboard.
Becoming an integral part of university curricula is a sure way to guarantee OOo development over the longest timeframe. In addition to contributing directly to development, universities are a good place for further adoption of the software. As they participate more, the code will evolve to better serve their needs, while the profile of OpenOffice will increase within the universities, and they’ll naturally begin to use it in departments across campus. Students will become comfortable with it, and bring it into the workplace after they graduate.
Strategically, this effort is of the utmost importance, and we wish Eric and the Education Project team great success!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Focus on OpenOffice.org’s Education Project
December 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
So far, OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac has been limited to Intel machines only. However, plenty of Mac users are still running PPC machines and would like to use the latest OOo on their computers as well.
Fortunately, Nakata Maho has been working on builds for PPC Macs, and with a little help from other developers, has overcome several issues in delivering a PPC version of OpenOffice 3.0.
Current versions available for download are developer builds, so you may encounter lots of bugs. And new versions may be released superseding those linked here. Try this page and look for the latest directory to see if newer builds are available. (As of this writing, the most recent is “Dev_DEV300_m36“).
Posted in Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
December 3rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Songbird is the audio player sibling to Firefox and Miro, providing innovative new features that connect music with other media and web community content. It’s a highly user-friendly open source program that lets its users discover, share and listen to music in new and unique ways.
Yesterday, Songbird 1.0 was released to the world.
What is Songbird exactly? In the project’s own words, “Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development. We’re working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music.”
Many new features have been implemented in this latest release, and there are many more planned for the next phases of development. Now is a great time to check it out, provide feedback, and even get involved to participate in its ongoing growth.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Songbird 1.0 Released
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!
Posted in Free Culture, Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
December 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice’s Extensions are getting a lot of attention lately. Several articles in the latest Linux Identity special issue describe extensions, including my own (The Top OOo Extensions, second from last in the list).
In addition to these, MakeUseOf.com’s Damien Oh writes 9 Must-Have OpenOffice Extensions, which offers another take on some of the best. Among his favorites are the Sun PDF Import Extension, Professional Template Pack II, OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs, Writer’s Tools, LanguageTool, and several more.
Posted in Extensions, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “9 Must-Have OpenOffice Extensions”
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.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on Foswiki Arrives
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.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
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?)
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Spicebird 0.7 Released
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!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Social Software | 2 Comments »
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.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on High Priority Free Software Projects