OpenOffice.org News Highlights

Table of Contents

October 2004

Replacing FrameMaker with OOo Writer

Germans claim Linux lowers costs

Open approach offers Mindef more choice

Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office

Open for Business - The 2004 OfB Choice Awards

September 2004

OpenOffice.org reveals marketing ambitions

Nonprofit brings Linux and open source to Hawaii

UK charity builds Linux network on a shoestring

NSW opens door to Linux offers

Leading Edge Forum Report 2004 - Open Source: Open for Business

Linux growing on SMB desktops: Yankee Group

'Independent' report used MS-sourced data to trash OSS

OpenOffice.org Conference Presentations

Open Office XML May Satisfy ISO

UN drive to boost free software

OpenOffice Set for Larger African Effort

A strong OpenOffice.org community is the key, argues Sun's Danese Cooper

August 2004

OpenOffice.org Art Project

Norwegian Native-Lang Project announced (NO)

OpenOffice.org in three SA languages for Software Freedom Day

U.K.'s NHS licenses Sun's Java Desktop System

Novell SA implements wall-to-wall Linux

(Vietnam) Students get free access to StarOffice software

Sun Deals Desktops Down Under

OpenOffice.org Team Cautiously Optimistic On AOL Office

UN body releases desktop Linux guide

LinuxWorld San Francisco Awards

New Book: "OpenOffice.org Macros Explained"

Linux overtakes Mac OS?

Desktop Linux offers challenge to "Microsoft world"

July 2004

OpenOffice.org learns Welsh

Canadian university picks Xandros Linux desktop for laptops

Press release: Allied Irish Bank Selects Sun Microsystems Java(TM) Desktop System

The Psychiatry in the County of Aarhus switches to OpenOffice

Yatirimlar, Inc

Gov't unveils open source solutions for SMEs, schools

HP unveils 4-user computer with OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice is a workable and flexible alternative to Microsoft Office

Free online OpenOffice.org support program available

UK government backed open source CMS supports OOo

Replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice

Microsoft offers the French 60 per cent off software licences

June 2004

OPENOFFICE.ORG ANNOUNCES VERSION 1.1.2 - HAKONE

OOoConv : 10,000 conversions

Ontario offers Sun's StarOffice to students

Case Study: Hentzenwerke Publishing switches to Linux

Sun lands bank deal for Java Desktop System

Munich Seeks Bids For Municipal Linux Migration

City of Treuchtlingen

City of Wolfsburg evaluates Linux Desktop

France looks to open-source in challenge to Microsoft

Successful migration to OOo

Battle of the giants

PC Gemilang: Linux outsells Windows

NSW Roads kicks out Exchange for Sun, deploys Mozilla

Novell Australia leads global Linux migration, dumps MS Office

StarOffice slashes seat costs

OpenOffice.org in 5th FISL (International Open Source Forum) in Brazil

EU eGovernment policy-makers encourage the uptake of open document formats

European Commission's IDA TAC Publishes Recommendations on Open Document Formats.

May 2004

OOoCon 2004: Call For Papers

Hungarian Native-Lang project

Azeri Native-Lang project

Upcoming Native-Lang projects

Linux in action: A public library's success story

Brussels embraces OpenOffice.org

Sonneburgh: OpenOffice.org deployment in Rotterdam

Scottish schools get help with StarOffice

Migration Study: Health First

StarOffice: ready for the big time

New White Paper about the OpenOffice.org XML File Format

Article: Programming with the StarOffice 7 Software Development Kit

Star Wars: StarOffice Vs MS office

Sun-Microsoft deal: Questionable significance for OpenOffice.org

April 2004

New Native-Lang Projects to be created

Talk-shows & Politics

Localizations

Development & Software

Marketing & Communication

Wal-Mart teams with Sun on Linux PCs

OpenOffice.org at Ministry of Health

310,000 copies of Catalan version distributed

10,000 Seats in Finance

The Israeli finance ministry plans to distribute 150,000 copies of OpenOffice

Gati Limited (India) uses OpenOffice.org

French OpenOffice.org Add-ons

Linux User & Developer Awards - Best Open Source Project: OpenOffice.org

March 2004

OASIS Milestone Reached

OpenOffice.org BizDev Project

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1RC3

OOo 1.1 Portuguese Native-Lang translation

FontOOo 1.0

OOo Education Mascot Competition

Microsoft Is Facing Long-Term Adjustment

City of Haarlem moving to OpenOffice.org

Singapore Ministry of Education and Argonne National Laboratory Turn To Java(TM) Enterprise System for Dramatic Cost Savings

City of Lille considering migration to OpenOffice.org

French Officials Eye Open-Source Apps

Haryana goes the open-source way with Sun

ICICI OneSource Dumps Microsoft Office For Sun

BharateeyaOO.o Gives Open Office a 'Desi' Push

Namibian OSS workshop produces Kiswahili dictionary

German distributor sells more than a million copies of Sun's StarOficce

OpenOffice.org Magazine

OpenOffice debuts bizdev community

Pravakta Plug-in for OpenOffice.org 1.1 Writer

XML Matters: XML for word processors

Microsoft releases OpenOffice.org 1.1 Competitive Guide

Comments/opinions reg. the OpenOffice.org 1.1 Competitive Guide

Microsoft Is Facing Long-Term Adjustment

Third package announced for PC Gemilang project

StarOffice takes on Microsoft

Linux Saves Big Money

HP Starts Pushing Desktop Linux

Novell to offer users a Windows experience on a Linux desktop

Life after Microsoft - One firm's complete conversion to open source

February 2004

Lao Native-Lang Project announced

Arabic & Hebrew Projects announced

Misc Native-Lang Project News

Japanese Announcement

ISO announcment

Linux and OpenOffice.org at the City of Paris

Indian insurance company shifts 10,000 desktops to StarOffice

Apache Forrest Support for OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org Flash Intro

20% for OpenOffice.org

StarOffice 7 review by PC Magazine

Opening Open Formats with XSLT

Microsoft's Office XML lags on Mac

StarOffice 7 available for Solaris x86

KDE integrates OpenOffice.org

Sun Lends Support to OpenOffice.org

Star Can Save Millions; But Look Before You Leap

January 2004

Texan city runs 'nonemotional' Linux pilot

Sun touts contract with Office Depot

Norwegian soon to become a native language project!

Kinko and OpenOffice.org

Government open source deployments you don't hear about

2003 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners Announced

OSNews 2003 Awards -- Our Favorites This Year

2003 OSDir Editor's Choice Award

Product of the Year 2003

December 2003

OpenOffice.org got a new "face"

Russian Native-Lang Project Announced

Sun Microsystems launches enterprise support for OpenOffice.org

Scripting Framework is Available

AOL ships PCs with OpenOffice.org based office suite

OpenOffice.org reduces the invoice of the police officers

Retirement Pension Tool for Excel AND OpenOffice.org

UK’s Office of Government Commerce evaluating Sun Java Desktop System

More money for patients through OpenOffice.org and Linux

Schoolweb Targets 40 Institutions

New Linux distribution "Impi" including OpenOffice.org

Israeli employment agency switches to OpenOffice.org

Sun lands 500,000 desktop Linux deal

Government plans to distribute computers to 5,000 schools nationwide

Microsoft Loses to Linux in Thailand Struggle

Sewing machine giant Janome adopts OpenOffice.org

Victorian government evaluates OpenOffice.org and StarOffice

Study: Save up to 25% with open source technologies

November 2003

API@OOo Newsletter

Sun Java Desktop System ISV/Developer Early Adopter Program

OpenOffice.org Market Share Analysis

Denmark urges government support for open source

International Forwarding Agent Heinz Huber

Midsize German firms say ja to Linux

OpenOffice.org 1.1 at Italian Schools

Israel slams the door on Microsoft

Life Insurance Corporation wants to switch to OpenOffice.org

Vietnam embracing open-source products

Australia's history archived in OpenOffice.org

Sun shines on NSW government desktops

The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines

Migration Guide by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior

OpenOffice.org XML Essentials

XML Interoperability Test

Office 2003/StarOffice Migration Survey - Germany

Office 2003/StarOffice Migration Survey – Switzerland

October 2004

Replacing FrameMaker with OOo Writer

"I began comparing FrameMaker and Writer when a regular on the OpenOffice.org User's list asked what it would take to give Writer the power of FrameMaker. When I started, I mentally pictured a scale with Microsoft Word on one end and FrameMaker on another, with Writer in the middle, but closer to Microsoft Word. As I proceeded, I found Writer was a much stronger contender than I had expected. At the end of the comparison, I had to conclude that the two products compare quite closely, depending on what features are more important to a given user."
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/10/04/150207

Germans claim Linux lowers costs

"The greatest cost saving opportunities that Soreon Research found were in the adoption of a variety of office applications on work-stations. Over three-years, a 2000-seat organisation would save around €525,000 with office applications, €57,000 with servers, €32,000 with content management systems and €21,000 with databases. For a €1,000,000 budget, the use of OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office would provide a 20 per cent cost advantage."

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19006

Open approach offers Mindef more choice

"The Defence Ministry installs Open-Office, an open source productivity suite, in 5,000 new computers as an alternative to proprietary software.

The Ministry of Defence (Mindef) has installed the OpenOffice productivity suite on 5,000 new desktop computers. This move is aimed at giving employees in the ministry an additional choice in productivity software. It will also help Mindef make 'significant' savings in terms of capital costs."

http://computertimes.asiaone.com.sg/news/story/0,5104,2868,00.html

Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office

"In a question and answer session after his closing speech a delegate asked what he should do faced with public sector customers interested in Star Office, Sun's budget rival to Microsoft Office. Ballmer replied: “Email me immediately and we’ll send in the cavalry. I’m joking...but I’m not. There is no reason to lose business to Star Office - it’s as good as what we were shipping seven years ago, it’s not compatible with Microsoft Office and it’s missing key applications like Outlook.”"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/06/ballmer_staroffice_charge/

Open for Business - The 2004 OfB Choice Awards

"Best Office Suite: OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 OpenOffice.org remains the only serious contender to replace Microsoft Office on Windows or GNU/Linux desktops. There are

some competitors, such as Abiword on Windows and GNU/Linux as well as Corel WordPerfect Office on Windows; OpenOffice.org seems to have a unique hold on progress toward offering comprehensive compatibility with Microsoft Office in an interface that should minimize adjustment time for users migrating to it."

http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330

September 2004

OpenOffice.org reveals marketing ambitions

"The organisation behind the office suite for Linux has released a marketing plan which explains how it plans to promote its open-source product.

The developers of OpenOffice.org, the open-source office productivity suite, have unveiled details of a major marketing push to coincide with the OpenOffice.org Conference, which has been taking place in Berlin, Germany, this week."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39167856,00.htm

Nonprofit brings Linux and open source to Hawaii

"Schools in Hawaii, affected by lean budgets like many other US states this year, are upgrading their computer systems with help from the open source community and Linux. A local nonprofit, the Oahu-based Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation (HOSEF), has supplied over a dozen Hawaiian schools with computers "recycled" with the Linux operating system and raised awareness of open source software (OSS).

[...]

"We have an obligation to reciprocate that which we receive, if possible. OSS (open source software) has been very good to me. I have used it to help employers save money. I have used [Openoffice.org] for my college degrees, and I use it daily on my computers. If I can take my entrepreneurial, economic, and business interests and channel my passion for OSS through them, then I should," Belford enthuses."

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6201542989.html

UK charity builds Linux network on a shoestring

"Homeless charity Alone in London spent less than £2,000 to set up a network of 30 PCs from scratch, compared to a similar-sized charity which spent £30,000 on building a network using proprietary solutions and new PCs, according to James Holland, who ran the project at Alone in London.

[...]

The only other cost was less than £250 for the cable, connectors, crimper and switches of the network infrastructure - in total, the network cost under £2,000. The PCs on the network run Red Hat Linux 9, OpenOffice, Evolution for email and Mozilla for browsing, saving Alone in London further costs on licences for desktop applications."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39166840,00.htm

NSW opens door to Linux offers

"THE NSW Department of Commerce has released its eagerly anticipated Linux tender, calling for a panel of suppliers to provide enterprise-level software and services for government agencies. The contract, reportedly worth $40 million, is seen as a major step forward for open source lobbyists, as it requests suppliers to provide Linux software for both desktop and server environments.

[...]

In keeping with the NSW government’s push for openness within its IT environment, the tender document states submissions can be lodged in file formats that can be read by OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Write and Microsoft Word."

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,10916500%255E15306,00.html

Leading Edge Forum Report 2004 - Open Source: Open for Business

"Desktop software such as OpenOffice, while still reaching maturity, could offer significant savings for large organizations. Office suite software can cost roughly $300 per seat—or $3 million in an organization of 10,000 people. That creates real savings when going to acquisition costs of $0.

[...]

Meanwhile, OpenOffice has climbed to a 14 percent share of the large enterprise office systems market. Microsoft, however, still holds a 94 percent share of the overall office market. "It is a David and Goliath story, to be sure," the report says, "but David is getting stronger.""

http://www.csc.com/features/2004/48.shtml

http://www.csc.com/features/2004/49.shtml

Linux growing on SMB desktops: Yankee Group

"Pay attention to the less-than-20-employee size market segment because that is where the early Linux versus Windows desktop wars will play out, she said. The very small business segment shows the greatest interest in Linux desktop adoption in the next 12 or more months (at 10 per cent), outpacing the intent of larger SMBs by four to six percentage points.

[...]

But YG also said SMBs ought to consider Linux as an alternative, lower cost desktop OS to Windows. The price of a Linux-loaded system with, for example, Sun's StarOffice productivity suite will be less than a system preloaded with a Windows operating system and Microsoft Office."

http://www.integratedmar.com/ecl-usa/story.cfm?item=18755

'Independent' report used MS-sourced data to trash OSS

"Microsoft, incidentally, has a long and inglorious history of reverse-process studies (i.e. starting with the conclusions then sourcing the data appropriate for arrival at it). There are many, many examples but we feel this blast from the past is particularly appropriate to current circumstances. Regrettably, the link to Linux Myths no longer works, but it was sort of release 1.0 of Get the Facts."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/09/ms_capgemini_newham_report/

OpenOffice.org Conference Presentations

The OpenOffice.org Conference presentations can be found at:

http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2004/thursday.html

http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2004/friday.html

Open Office XML May Satisfy ISO

"A letter to Sun Microsystems' COO Jonathan Schwartz by the European Commission (EC) this week may set the stage for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to adopt the Open Office XML format (also known as OO.o XML) as an ISO standard. If it does, the stamp of approval would mark the largest ever validation of Sun's work on the desktop."

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3414101

Weblog:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/09/24/SmartEC

Slashdot story:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/04/09/27/1111202.shtml?tid=117&tid=102&tid=1&tid=218

UN drive to boost free software

"The United Nations is holding events across Asia to encourage the region to adopt free and open source software.

The UN's International Open Source Network (IOSN) is organising the first annual Software Freedom Day on 28 August, giving out CDs and booklets about the technology."

"These include the operating system Linux, OpenOffice, the Mozilla web browser and e-mail project, mySQL database and the Apache web server.

Computer users in South Africa are joining in too, and will be able to take their computers to one an "install-fest" station to have free software installed."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3601710.stm

OpenOffice Set for Larger African Effort

"As part of Software Freedom Day, set for August 28, OpenOffice will be translated into three African languages for the first time. After Saturday, the open-source desktop suite will be available to speakers of the South African languages of Zulu, Sepedi and Afrikaans. The new versions have been prepared by Translate.org.za, a South African translation project that spent two years developing the software."

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/openoffice-zulu-36172.html

A strong OpenOffice.org community is the key, argues Sun's Danese Cooper

"You may have read some of the articles, blogs, and newsgroup postings about excerpts from Sun's settlement with Microsoft that appear in our SEC filing. The discussion centered around the protection we secured for the StarOffice brand, and implications for the OpenOffice.org community."

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;815001838;fp;4;fpid;4

August 2004

OpenOffice.org Art Project

The OpenOffice.org Art Project has been formed to create and maintain an art portfolio for use by all OpenOffice.org projects.

Initial and ongoing activities include collating existing OpenOffice.org artwork and liaising with other OpenOffice.org projects that have or need artwork.

The Art Project (http://marketing.openoffice.org/art/) web site displays the artwork and graphics in galleries, provides information about licenses, requesting graphics, and how to participate.

The Art Project is currently seeking designers and graphical artists to create icons, logos, banners, labels, and fulfill future requests from other OpenOffice.org contributors. The artwork and graphics are to be seen and used throughout the OpenOffice.org product and community.

If you are interested, please visit the Art Project web site for further information.

http://marketing.openoffice.org/art/

Norwegian Native-Lang Project announced (NO)

"We are very pleased to announce the opening of the Norwegian Native-Lang Project (http://no.openoffice.org) led by Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes. This project is an offspring of the prestigious Skolelinux community who is a major player in many fields of the Free and Open Source Software thanks to its Linux distribution, its solution platform and its community.

The localization of OpenOffice.org to the Norwegian languages Bokmål and Nynorsk has resulted in many schools and institutions using OpenOffice.org. This in turn has led to several providers offering books, courses and other teaching materials. As OpenOffice.org is becoming very popular among Norwegian speakers, the Native-Lang Confederation is greeting an important new member in its family.

Good luck to the Norwegian Native-Lang Project!"

http://native-lang.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=13

OpenOffice.org in three SA languages for Software Freedom Day

"In celebration of this weekend's global Software Freedom Day, Translate.org.za is planning the release of the OpenOffice.org suite in three South African languages. The popular free software office suite will be available in Zulu, Afrikaans and Sepedi. Tswana is also included but in beta form."

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=327

U.K.'s NHS licenses Sun's Java Desktop System

"The U.K.'s National Health Service said this week that it purchased 5,000 licenses for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java Desktop System (JDS) as an alternative to Windows, in a move that could potentially open the door to greater use of the open-source software by the health agency.

The NHS is implementing a $9 billion program to upgrade its ailing IT infrastructure. It began evaluating the potential use of Sun's open-source desktop system last December. JDS includes the company's StarOffice productivity suite, a GNOME desktop and the Mozilla Web browser, which Sun has touted as a comprehensive open-source alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows."

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/desktops/story/0,10801,95531,00.html

Novell SA implements wall-to-wall Linux

"Novell has not only become the biggest thing in Linux lately, but the company has taken the decision to implement open source solutions on its internal systems. Novell SA, however, is pioneering this worldwide decision by being the first to implement total wall-to-wall Linux and open source solutions from servers to desktops.

The global company recently passed a mandate whereby the company would have to pursue the adoption of OpenOffice across all of its regions. Novell SA, under the leadership of Stafford Masie, has taken it a step further and has decided to implement Linux and open source software across its entire enterprise."

""We will be running OpenOffice as our office environment and have loaded all the filters needed to ensure that people can still access and open Microsoft documents. With OpenOffice they can even save these documents as a .doc. We have also implemented SuSE 9 desktops on a Ximian desktop environment and the Evolution e-mail client," states Singh"

http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/software/2004/0408040805.asp?A=BAP&S=Business%20Applications&O=FPIN

Additional reporting:

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=319

(Vietnam) Students get free access to StarOffice software

"Vietnamese students and teachers can use StarOffice 7 software free-of-charge in compiling documents, calculating, drawing and saving data at home or schools.

An agreement to this effect was signed on Monday by Sun Microsystems Director Andrew Lim in charge of South Asian education and research and Vice Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan."

http://www.vnagency.com.vn/NewsA.asp?LANGUAGE_ID=2&CATEGORY_ID=32&NEWS_ID=114025

Sun Deals Desktops Down Under

"Initially, Sun will install its StarOffice software in 1,500 desktops in 120 offices. The goal is to connect up to 3,000 users to the new system. Sun said its future plans include stocking the RTA's back-end infrastructure with its other software products including the Sun Java System Portal Server, Sun Java System Access Manager, Sun Java System Identity Manager and Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition software."

http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3397671

OpenOffice.org Team Cautiously Optimistic On AOL Office

"Members of the OpenOffice.org community are greeting yesterday's announcement of a new version of OpenOffice.org with cautious optimism."

"As more product information is revealed about AOL Office, the OpenOffice.org team is sure to get the answers they seek. And the community will get a lesson in the pros and cons of open source commoditization."

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2004081301526NWDTSW

UN body releases desktop Linux guide

"A UN-funded organisation has produced a Linux desktop user guide to encourage the take-up of Linux in developing countries.

A Linux desktop manual for novice PC users has been produced by a UN-funded organisation, the International Open Source Network (IOSN). The manual has been produced to encourage developing countries to use open-source software. It includes basic information on how to manage files, browse the Web and produce OpenOffice documents on a Linux PC."

"The Linux user manual is available online in OpenOffice and PDF format."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39164367,00.htm

LinuxWorld San Francisco Awards

"Winners of Product Excellence Awards Announced at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo; Awards recognize the best products and services on the exhibit floor

[...]

Best Productivity/Business Application
Sun Microsystems: StarOffice and Migration Tools"

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040804005205&newsLang=en

New Book: "OpenOffice.org Macros Explained"

"This book provides an introduction to the creation and management of macros in OpenOffice. Numerous examples and explanations demonstrate proper techniques and discuss known problems and solutions. The underlying data structure is discussed and techniques are introduced to evaluate OpenOffice objects, facilitating the use of returned objects in the absence of sufficient documentation."

More information about the book can be found at:

http://www.pitonyak.org/book/

Linux overtakes Mac OS?

"One analyst at IDC believes that this has already happened. "Linux captured the number two spot as desktop operating system in 2003," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky in a recent interview.

By 2007 IDC estimates that Linux will have 6 per cent of the desktop market in terms of units, Kusnetzky said. "

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9336&Page=1&pagePos=1

Desktop Linux offers challenge to "Microsoft world"

"MIT Technology Review has published an informative article about the current state of Linux on the desktop and the challenge it poses to Microsoft. Wade Roush examines the usage and market share Linux is realizing in the enterprise and public sector worldwide. Reiterating IDC estimates that Linux now claims more desktops worldwide than Apple, the article suggests that Linux's 3 percent market share will double by 2006."

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8719735054.html

July 2004

OpenOffice.org learns Welsh

"OpenOffice.org, Sun’s open source office software package, is now available in Welsh from Meddal.com. The package includes a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing and presentations package, and a Welsh language spell checker."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/22/mewngofnodi/

Canadian university picks Xandros Linux desktop for laptops

"Xandros has announced that Canada's Acadia University has selected the Xandros Desktop Operating System (OS) as the Linux offering for its undergraduate program. The Nova Scotia-based facility, credited as the first university in Canada to integrate notebook computers into the curriculum, is offering a customized version of Xandros on Dell D600 laptops through a three year program that is expected to outfit 9,000 laptops to students and faculty."

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7130153723.html

Press release: Allied Irish Bank Selects Sun Microsystems Java(TM) Desktop System

"Global Trend Continues as One of Ireland's Biggest Banking and Financial Services Groups Turns to Sun's Java(TM) Desktop System for a Secure, Reliable and Affordable Desktop Platform"

"Key features of the Java Desktop System include Sun's StarOffice productivity suite, a familiar look and feel and file and printing interoperability."

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK3.story&STORY=/www/story/06-29-2004/0002201956&EDATE=TUE+Jun+29+2004,+11:33+AM

The Psychiatry in the County of Aarhus switches to OpenOffice

"Why OpenOffice? The Psychiatry has to change its office suite as the Corel office

suite is no longer supported/upgraded in Danish language and the file exchange format in the public sector is Word97 .DOC format. OpenOffice is an open-component product based on APIs and an XML-based file format. By changing to OpenOffice the Psychiatry saves an initial investment of DKK 4,8 mill. in license expenses to Microsoft Office. During 2004 the IT-department designs new templates and macros, program setup, and plans education, etc. in cooperation with a test group and our superusers. Finally, on 2 February 2004 OpenOffice 1.1.1 in Danish is introduced on all workstations. By Mid May 2004 OpenOffice is the sole office suite in the Psychiatry in the County of Aarhus."

http://ph.auh.dk/ookompetence/openoffice_uk.htm

Yatirimlar, Inc

"Turkish OpenOffice.org project group (tr.openoffice.org) has announced another success story with Yatirimlar, Inc. Yatirimlar publishes an adjudication newspaper every Monday in Turkish and English, and this newspaper is distributed to thousands of readers throughout Turkey. All the editors work with OpenOffice.org, so we decided to have an interview with Filiz Keskin from Yatirimlar. It can be reached at: tr.openoffice.org/yatirimlar.html (in Turkish)."

Source: Görkem Cetin

Gov't unveils open source solutions for SMEs, schools

" THE ADVANCED Science Technology Institute (ASTI), the research and development arm of the Department of Science and Technology, has developed several open source solutions designed for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and schools, INQ7.net learned over the weekend. The agency has released the latest version of its Linux desktop system called Bayanihan Linux 3.0, which features a graphical user interface (GUI) similar to Microsoft Windows, according to Chivas Sicam, ASTI senior science specialist.

[...]

However, a CD package is available for 200 pesos. This package contains an OpenOffice suite, a browser, multimedia applications, e-mail software, and a Bluetooth synchronization module, among other items."

http://www.inq7.net/inf/2004/jul/27/inf_1-1.htm

HP unveils 4-user computer with OpenOffice.org

"HP has introduced a multi-user desktop PC with MandrakeLinux. Dubbed the "441" solution, the concept system can be used by four users simultaneously.

This new PC, available from HP for 'emerging markets' targets the education market and ships with productivity applications including OpenOffice.org, educational software, developer tools, and role-based customized graphical user interfaces. The 441 boasts cost savings at 50% of acquisition costs and 65% of maintenance costs, according to the HP website."

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3020785172.html

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?action=view&id=310&topic=Open%20Source

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=316

OpenOffice is a workable and flexible alternative to Microsoft Office

"All this by way of introduction to my pitch for OpenOffice.org, an open-source software suite that at best is a lot more program than Works and at worst only a little less functional than Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice.org, which was popularized as Star Office from Sun Microsystems, is more than adequate for perhaps 95 percent of users. Most interestingly, it is the only free Office-style program that runs on both Windows and Linux, as well as the Macintosh, and its files are mostly (more on that later) compatible with Microsoft Office. You can buy Sun's version, which includes product support, for $79."

"Problems with Word are usually pretty simple to fix, but complex formulas in Excel occasionally generate outright spurious results. Setting up a mail list in OO isn't as bonehead simple as it is with Works. A fair number of users would like to see an integrated e-mail program and personal information manager, a la Outlook.

But the price is right, and the program is more than adequate for casual users. If you're doing anything complicated, evaluate the program yourself."

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-txdolinar3880443jul04,0,5568469.column?coll=ny-news-columnists

Free online OpenOffice.org support program available

"Enfobridge has announced a free support program for the OpenOffice.org application suite, along with the launch of a new website that offers users a way to register for support and download OpenOffice.org software. The program is available to new and existing OpenOffice.org users.

Free professional support is available online for up to 30 days, through a trial program from Enfobridge. Through DownloadOpenOffice.org, the company is offering two levels of software support. A free version gives users unlimited access to the online support staff for 30 days, and an extended 90 days support subscription provides 90 days of support for US $13.95."

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2978835938.html

UK government backed open source CMS supports OOo

"APLAWS is an Open Source Content Management System developed to assist UK local authorities deliver services online as part of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's Local e-Government Programme.

New Functionality in the latest (July 2004) release:

* Allow searching of Word, Excel, PDF and OpenOffice.org attachments

http://aplaws.sourceforge.net/"

Replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice

"Spend a few days getting familiar with OpenOffice. Pretty soon you'll discover that it has no real liabilities. Begin exchanging documents with customers and friends, and they won't notice the difference. Once everyone in the office is familiar with the programs, you can uninstall MS Office and save yourself a bundle on licensing or renewal fees."

http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/biztools/article.php/3374141

Microsoft offers the French 60 per cent off software licences

"Microsoft has offered a 60 per cent cut off the prices of its licences for three years to the city of Paris. It's a tactic that bore no fruit in Munich when the German city government opted for open-source software on 14,000 desktops earlier this month. Will the software giant be more convincing in Paris and stop the French making the swap? Faced with the possibility of losing the French capital, Gates and chums have opted for the same tactic that they used in Bavaria when confronted with customers making eyes at Linux or OpenOffice: agreeing to take a knife to the cost of licences. According to French daily Libération, in January, Microsoft made an offer to Philipped Schil, the Paris mayoral authorities' director of information technology and systems – an offer cutting licence prices by around 60 per cent for the local government's computers, which meant some 15,000 PCs. In financial terms, the bill for three years would drop from €13.27m to €5.65m. "

http://software.silicon.com/os/0,39024651,39121786,00.htm

June 2004

OPENOFFICE.ORG ANNOUNCES VERSION 1.1.2 - HAKONE

"18 June, 2004 - 20H00 UTC

OpenOffice.org is proud to announce the immediate availability of the new 1.1.2 version of the award-winning open source office suite, codenamed Hakone.

This new version is initially available on the Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP), GNU/Linux (X86 and PowerPC) and Solaris (SPARC and X86) platforms.

In addition to English, builds for Czech, Danish, French, German, Japanese and Slovak are immediately available with other localisations following shortly."

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=206

OOoConv : 10,000 conversions

OOoConv has passed 10,000 conversions !

http://www.oooconv.de/

This is a very nice performance for this tool which has been online since the 1st of January of this year. It was developed by Laurent Godard, and is hosted in Germany thanks to Patrick Prasse who has offered the hosting and the domain name.

This tool is now translated into 17 languages with the help of the whole OpenOffice.org community. The highest conversion rate is in the english language (about 40%), however some languages have only been available for a short time.

The stats given on the site show a wider use of the convertor from Writer to Word (more than 50%).

Many thanks to Laurent Godard for this tool that allow a larger availability of OOo file format, but also to Patrick Prasse, Simon Tosser, Fred Labbe and all the translators.

[Submitted by Sophie Gautier]

Ontario offers Sun's StarOffice to students

"The Ontario Ministry of Education has acquired Star Office 7 licences from Sun Microsystems Canada for all the province's 72 public and Catholic school boards, The Star Office productivity suite is being described as part of a movement to deliver superior technology to students while keeping spending in check. It is the largest- StarOffice 7 delivery in North America, with more than 2.5 million students having access to the alternative office suite on Windows.

Schools at all levels have chosen the interoperable Star Office suite instead of more expensive office productivity products because they can re-invest saved funds into other projects for students, the ministry stated.

StarOffice software is an open-source based, comprehensive office productivity suite that runs on Solaris, Windows and Linux and is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. The StarOffice suite has an intuitive interface and includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database capabilities."

http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040527.gtsun0527/BNStory/Technology/

Case Study: Hentzenwerke Publishing switches to Linux

"The third function was to determine if we were going to get hung up with exchanging data with outside entities. As with internal data conversion, this step turned out to be a non-issue. OpenOffice.org reads Microsoft Office files with ease, although we're finding more and more people are sending files in Adobe .PDF format, which is also readable by a variety of open source tools that come standard with popular distributions. And the graphical images that we exchange are also platform-independent."

http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/05/28/1936211.shtml?tid=132&tid=2&tid=82&tid=94

Sun lands bank deal for Java Desktop System

"Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop System (JDS) is to be deployed on 7,500 desktops throughout Allied Irish Bank's (AIB) branches. The network will run the Linux-based JDS software, and the deployment includes the migration of branch applications. The roll-out is planned for next year as part of AIB's New Branch Banking Platform."

http://www.computing.co.uk/News/1156272

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1618126,00.asp

Munich Seeks Bids For Municipal Linux Migration

"The city of Munich in Germany will officially kick off its much publicized Linux migration project on July 1 but it remains unclear which vendors will nail the $40 million contract, a spokesman said."

"The project entails the migration of 14,000 desktop and notebook computers from Microsoft Windows and Office software to Linux and OpenOffice."

"In the same press release, the city said it had entered a pilot project with German applications giant SAP to adapt SAP for OpenOffice."

"Meanwhile, Novell announced a major Linux win with another European city even as Munich begins the vendor selection process for its 40,000 seat migration. On Tuesday, Novell's SUSE Linux subsidiary announced it had landed a contract to migrate the server infrastructure of the largest city in Norway " Bergen -- from Unix and Windows servers to a Linux infrastructure based on SUSE Enterprise Server 8 platform. The deal will impact 50,000 users, according to a statement released by SUSE."

http://www.internetwk.com/allStories/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=22100148

City of Treuchtlingen

The City of Treuchtlingen is using StarOffice in a Sun Ray ultra-thin client environment. The interesting part of the German article below is the link to an end user survey. According to the survey the users are very happy with the new environment. Here is one sample statement from the survey:

"Compared with the former equipment (MS Windows NT4/Novell/Zen 1997-2001) I like the new environment

0% absolutely not

25% similarly well

50% better

16,67% I would like to have it at home, too."

http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2004/6925.html

http://www.open-government.org/index.php?id=93

City of Wolfsburg evaluates Linux Desktop

According to the articles mentioned below the City of Wolfsburg will have 21 employees testing a Linux desktop in parallel to their existing Windows desktop.

http://www.pressebox.de/index.php?boxid=20858&sid=searchengine_sid

http://www.golem.de/0406/31511.html

France looks to open-source in challenge to Microsoft

"Civil Service Minister Renaud Dutreil told Reuters that France wants to use open-source software providers to resupply part of the almost 1 million state computers under a government cost-cutting drive designed to trim a bulging public deficit. "The competition is open," he said. "My estimate is that we can cut the state software bill at least in half."

At stake, in the case of office suite software alone, is about $362.5 million worth of software to be introduced to state computers over three years. Savings on operating systems could be of a similar amount, officials said. "

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,93946,00.html

Successful migration to OOo

Summary of article into English from Dutch:

The CIBG (Brussels, Belgium) switched about 100 users to OpenOffice.org for practical reasons rather than the basis of ideology. The migration went smoothly.

http://www.cibg.irisnet.be/ci/NL/Supports/Communicatie/Press (Dutch)

Battle of the giants

"COMPUTER giants Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are battling it out for dominance in the Hungarian education sector.

On May 4, Sun announced that it had concluded a deal with the Hungarian Education Ministry which would make the application suite StarOffice 7 available for free to staff and students at all of Hungary's 5,500 schools and 67 higher education institutions.

The program has previously operated successfully in other countries, but has only now been introduced in Hungary."

http://www.budapestsun.com/full_story.asp?ArticleId=%7B7DB0F14CAE8349C590672A6DBDC6A5C5%7D&From=

PC Gemilang: Linux outsells Windows

" Ten thousand PC Gemilang units were sold in the first few months following the brand’s debut, of which more than 7,000 were Linux-based machines. Pikom said the Linux PC generated the highest demand due to its attractive price.

The PC Gemilang project was kicked off in March with two models: A RM988 PC running a Linux-based operating system and bundled with the OpenOffice productivity suite; and a RM1,147 desktop with the Bahasa Malaysia version of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and Works Suite 2004."

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2004/6/23/technology/8282356&sec=technology

NSW Roads kicks out Exchange for Sun, deploys Mozilla

"The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) will migrate 1500 users across 120 offices from Microsoft Exchange to Sun’s Java Enterprise System messaging and calendar servers for e-mail and calendaring.

As part of the contract, the RTA will also deploy Sun’s Staroffice productivity suite for wordprocessing, spreadsheets and presentation development; the open source Mozilla browser will be used for accessing e-mail and calendar information."

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;148604439;fp;16;fpid;0

Novell Australia leads global Linux migration, dumps MS Office

"The migration, which will see staff across the globe using SuSE Linux systems running OpenOffice, is partly motivated by broader commercial concerns."

"However, Novell Asia Pacific CIO Sam Gennaoui said that there was also a basic financial argument for the shift. "We are like any other company; we still have ROIs to deliver," he said."

"Around 90 per cent all of the company's 350 Asia-Pacific staff, half of whom are based in Australia, have started using OpenOffice as a replacement for Microsoft's Office suite.

Reaction so far has been positive. "There always tends to be some pushback from users, but there's a sense of willingness to embrace the new technology," Gennaoui said. The local operation is "way ahead of the movement" in the rest of Novell, he added. "We have a smaller base of users and we're more flexible."

Novell has also developed a number of custom enhancements to OpenOffice to help migrate common internal document templates. The source code for those enhancements will be made available to the broader OpenOffice community."

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;526044789;fp;16;fpid;0

StarOffice slashes seat costs

"IT wasn't long ago that Microsoft Office, at $500-plus a seat, was the only option for businesses seeking an integrated office suite. Times are changing, however.

Sun Microsystems is slowly winning over large business customers to its StarOffice 7, which costs $50 a user.

IDC analyst Megan Dahlgren says Sun's success is based on its reputation for high-quality support, coupled with deep discounting aimed at getting StarOffice widely adopted by government and big business.

StarOffice is based on the open-source OpenOffice.org, both of which offer similar functions to Microsoft Office in spreadsheets, word processing and presentations.

StarOffice product manager Laurie Wong says Sun Java Desktop is a complete package made up of StarOffice, Ximian Evolution (an Outlook alternative) and the Adabase database.

OpenOffice.org and StarOffice claim several technology advantages over Microsoft Office, including the ability to output PDF files from the application without needing extra software, the option of using file formats based on industry-standard XML that are easily readable by other programs, and cross-platform versions of the package for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris.

XML brings an important change in the way office packages work, enabling storage of structured content in a file, allowing the information to be reused easily in other applications.

Wong says Microsoft's file format is a binary file wrapped in some XML tags. "It's XML only as long as you use another Microsoft application, or one authorised by the company to read it, which is not in the spirit of XML," he says.

In comparison, the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice binary file format is a zipped version of an XML file, allowing other software or users to see the file format in readable XML.

Sewing machine maker Janome Australia has found the cost savings of the OpenOffice.org package outweigh the inconvenience of migrating staff away from Microsoft Office, IT manager Scott Langford says.

The biggest challenge was educating users to import Microsoft Office documents into the software, he says."

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,9821373%5E15382%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

OpenOffice.org in 5th FISL (International Open Source Forum) in Brazil

The coordination of the OOoBr is celebrating the results of its participation in the 5th FISL, held in Porto Alegre, from June 3rd to 5th, 2004.

Altogether there were 4 days of activities (one pre-event extra); 3 companies sponsoring the stand of OpenOffice.org.br; 9 hours of panels, meetings and presentations in the pre-event and in the Forum; over 800 users registered in the stand of OooBr, from 23 Brazilian States, Argentina, Uruguay, England, United States, France, Spain and Germany; 100 t-shirts sold in 3 days; 17 raffle winners of books and t-shirts, and 200Kg of food donated by the project, the sponsors and the OOo community to the “Fome Zero” program.

More information:

[english]http://www.openoffice.org.br/saite/conteudo.php?inc=noticias/ver_noticia&id_aba=57&id_noticia=14

[español]http://www.openoffice.org.br/saite/conteudo.php?inc=noticias/ver_noticia&id_aba=57&id_noticia=13

EU eGovernment policy-makers encourage the uptake of open document formats

http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/jsps/index.jsp?fuseAction=showDocument&parent=news&documentID=2387

See also:

Advantages of the OpenOffice.org XML File Format Used by the StarOffice Office Suite

http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/whitepapers/index.html

European Commission's IDA TAC Publishes Recommendations on Open Document Formats.

"You can find some of the materials on the EC Web site. Our basic points were first that the Office XML formats are incomplete (no PowerPoint, missing pieces in Excel), second that the licensing terms are kind of scary (our lawyer's acid-tongued comments have been excised from the online papers), third that the OO.o format is much more reusability-oriented, and finally that Microsoft has iron control over every aspect of their XML, while the OO.o format is well on its way to being an OASIS standard."

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-06-17-a.html

May 2004

OOoCon 2004: Call For Papers

The second worldwide OpenOffice.org is approaching quickly. The conference team is still looking for more speakers, exhibitors and sponsors. Thus, submit your abstracts today!

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=announce

Hungarian Native-Lang project

The Hungarian Native-Lang project lead by Andras Timar has opened its doors and is already bringing some fresh air to the Confederation by having been the first to implement fully localized webpages to OpenOffice.org and removing the default english links and navbars.

Azeri Native-Lang project

"Thanks to the mentoring of Charles-H Schulz, Rail Aliev and Gorkem Cetin, The Azeri project lead by Emin Husyenov has started to work rather quickly after his setup phase and is now almost completed.

Upcoming Native-Lang projects

Bengali (bn) and Croatian (hr) Native-Lang Projects to be soon set up; Armenian (am) and Ukrainian Projects in queue, but they should follow soon after Louis has checked the necessary steps with them. More on the reform of the Native-Lang Confederation, and the common development of right-to-left (RTL) lanuages (currently focused on Thai, Arabic and Hebrew) in the Native-Lang newsletter:

http://native-lang.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=3143

Courtesy of Charles-H.Schulz, Native-Lang Confederation

http://native-lang.openoffice.org/

Linux in action: A public library's success story

"Over the past year, the Howard County (Md.) Public Library has migrated more than 200 public PCs from Windows 98 and Windows NT to Linux. These PCs are used both to surf the Internet and to access the library's catalogues. NewsForge recently spoke with Brian Auger, associate director of the library, and the IT team responsible for the migration. We wanted to learn more about why and how it was accomplished, and how pleased they are with the results.

...

Using LFS as a starting point, Luis and Mike were able to build a minimal Linux kernel that included only the functionality required by the "kiosk style" machines. They added the Gnome desktop environment, the Mozilla browser, and OpenOffice.org to complete the picture. They call the new distribution "Lumix." It's a combination of their first names, Luis and Mike. By the way, it's pronounced loo-mix, not lummox, which is something else entirely."

http://os.newsforge.com/os/04/05/03/1520209.shtml?tid=2&tid=82&tid=94

Brussels embraces OpenOffice.org

“C.I.R.B has a mission of technological watch driven by the Government of Brussels” says Miss Lökkhana Quaremme, C.I.R.B PR manager, “and will deliver a positioning report about OpenSource opportunities for Local Government Agencies”. The actual feedback seems to be a positive first step.

...

After a product evaluation period, the 100 users got an dedicated information program, followed by the installation of OpenOffice.org 1.1 on every desktop, and a training. Document templates were migrated and support implemented thru an internal and online F.A.Q.

...

“We did not face any heavy technical issues, just small details to fix” says finally Miss Lökkhana Quaremme.

French article:

http://www.toolinux.com/lininfo/news/news/news20040524005103.htm

Dutch article:

http://www.cibg.irisnet.be/ci/NL/Supports/Communicatie/Press

Sonneburgh: OpenOffice.org deployment in Rotterdam

"In 2003 there has been a noticable trend of public organisations considering to migrate (or already migrating) to OpenOffice[.org] (1) . Large-scale examples include the French Ministry of Interior and the city of Munich, but small cases are also common. This paper looks at such a small-scale application in a residential care centre for ill or elderly people, located in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. We look at what has been done and why it makes sense for them to use OpenOffice[.org]."

http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/jsps/index.jsp?fuseAction=showDocument&documentID=1799&parent=chapter&preChapterID=0-452-470

Scottish schools get help with StarOffice

"The Scottish Executive has signalled a possible move away from Microsoft Office with the signing on Thursday of a deal that will enable it to manage licences for Sun's StarOffice7 suite of office applications.

As a result of the deal, any school, college, university or local authority in Scotland will be able to ask the Executive to manage its licences.

The Executive has not actually bought any licences -- which are provided at no cost to educational establishments under Sun's StarOffice 7 Education Licensing programme. But the deal will allow it to provide licensing support for 2,833 Scottish schools - which would mean 738,597 students and 50,048 teachers using StarOffice if every

school decided to take advantage of the offer."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39153936,00.htm

Migration Study: Health First

"There are two big IT projects going on at Health First Inc., and Linux is at the heart of both of them. Health First, a family of Brevard County, Fla., nonprofit health care facilities, is migrating its desktops to OpenOffice[.org] and bringing in many Novell's Nterprise Linux Services. Weaning 6,000 IT users off of Microsoft Office 97 on 3,500 PCs is no small feat. It's manageable, however, if an IT shop takes it one step at a time, according to Danny J. Wall and Daniel Bray, Health First IT network administrators. Their primary pain comes from integrating OpenOffice[.org] with Health First's almost 500 applications.

In part 1 of this in-depth migration story, Wall and Bray explain why Health First is backing away from Microsoft Office and choosing OpenOffice[.org]. Next, they describe the OpenOffice[.org] implementation process. Then, in part three, Wall tells us how Health First is bringing in and will be using Novell's new Linux services."

Part 1:

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid39_gci964811,00.html

Part 2:

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid39_gci964821,00.html

Part 3:

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid39_gci964823,00.html

StarOffice: ready for the big time

"StarOffice is already very popular and has become something of a standard on Linux PCs often in the guise of OpenOffice[.org], its open source brother. Sun acquired Star Division GmbH five years ago, with the clear intention of competing directly with Microsoft. It has taken time for Sun to establish a competitive position, though. StarOffice never got strong reviews until version 6, which debuted in early 2002. It is just now in version 7, which is attracting even more attention because of the quality of the release."

"For large organizations looking to reduce the costs of the desktop significantly, Star Office looks compelling. Siemens did a trial project to test the Ximian/OpenOffice/Linux combination with office staff in Germany last year. (Open Office has some minor differences to StarOffice, such as fewer fonts and graphics) Siemens concluded that changing to Linux and StarOffice was no more expensive than a Windows upgrade - in terms of training. On top of that, it saved 20 to 30 per cent in administration costs, 50 per cent in hardware costs and 80 per cent in licensing costs. Pretty compelling when you think about it."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/29/staroffice_reaches_maturity/

New White Paper about the OpenOffice.org XML File Format

This new white paper explains the advantages of the OpenOffice.org XML file format used by all applications of the StarOffice software. Developers also get a basic introduction to the different tools and resources available for leveraging the XML file format programmatically.

The white paper can be found at at:

http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/whitepapers/index.html

Article: Programming with the StarOffice 7 Software Development Kit

"While StarOffice software offers a full-featured office suite, you can make it even better by extending it with the StarOffice Software Development Kit (SDK). You can create customized extensions for your own organization or full-featured plug-ins that other organizations may want to license."

http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/desktop/reference/techart/staroffice_sdk.html

Star Wars: StarOffice Vs MS office

"Mr Pramanik said that StarOffice is fast gaining ground, citing a recent large 10,000 user win from United India and 8,000 units from the Haryana government as an example."

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/638623.cms

Sun-Microsoft deal: Questionable significance for OpenOffice.org

"In January 2001, Corel announced its intentions to spin off its various Linux products and not work on broadening its WordPerfect customer base beyond its existing audience. Now Microsoft has reached an agreement with Sun, settling their $4 billion lawsuit for $1.6 billion. Since Microsoft's total payment to Sun will come to well over 10 times the amount it paid to Corel, I wondered what impact if any this might have on OpenOffice.org? I asked Dr. Louis Suarez-Potts, community mnager for OpenOffice.org and Chair of the Community Council, what the possible repercussions might be for the popular open source office suite."

http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/04/19/2117259.shtml?tid=130&tid=82&tid=93

April 2004

New Native-Lang Projects to be created

Two new Native-Lang Projects are on their way to be created: The Azeri Project led by Emin Huseynov is at this moment in his pre-set up phase. Emin wanted to start the Localization effort first, but insisted on providing his community a meeting place here on OpenOffice.org. The domain name hasn't been set up yet (no JCA nor ssh keys submitted). However Charles-H. Schulz has spent some times helping out Emin off list and asked Rail Aliev and Görkem Cetin from the Russian and Turkish Project to bring Emin and his community on the right track.

Ukrainian Native-Lang Project proposal accepted: Led by Mr Vad V. Mashckoff (Adiel), backed by the Alt Linux Community and OSDN Ukraine, the project will soon start. The Localization effort however is being undertaken by Sergyi Kudryk and will remain a separate initiative on SourceForge.

Talk-shows & Politics

After two months of off list work involving discussions with many native-lang leads, Charles-H. Schulz comes up with what he believes will be the "Next Big Thing" © for the Native-Lang Confederation.

Proposal for the Directorates for the Native-Lang Confederation posted and voted on; despite a big majority in favor of the reform Charles-H. Schulz halted the process in order to propose a set of ideas to be implemented that would acknowledge and prevent possible risks of failure.

Software Patents not welcomed at all: the Homepage of OpenOffice.org and many native-lang projects as well have displayed their solidarity agains the Software Patents in the European Union. Simon Brouwer, lead of the Dutch (nl) native-lang community launched the momentum and got many followers.

Native-Lang Confederation Guidelines revised and augmented by Charles-H. Schulz: new policies on projects'setup and creation processes and dispute settlement policies inside the native-lang projects.

Localizations

Ainu Localization effort started: Despite some cultural issues making the translation of technical terms difficult, the Ainu people will get OpenOffice.org in their own language; Hirano Kazunari, a member of the Japanese Native-lang Project works on it with several other volunteers. Louis proposed to interview the Ainu localization team and sent them questions to the team. The team has answered them so the final interview will soon be published as an article linked from the homepage.

Pavel Janik has extracted the Readme files of the upcoming 1.1.2 in order to allow the native-lang projects to translate them and hence provide 100% translated builds in every available language.

Many localized 1.1.1 builds released: Prague gets multilingual: French, German, Danish, Turkish, Japanese, Italian and many more available for download.

Development & Software

OOVirg, FontOO, OOConv get translated in several languages: after having included OOVirg in the OOo software suite, the add-ons family from the Native-Lang projects are getting a widespread use thanks to their translations in several languages. Last to date but not least, OOConv has been translated in Hungarian. Congratulations to their authors and translators!

Marketing & Communication

Several leads, such as Marko Gronroos (fi) and Davide Dozza (it) expressed the idea to have another web site for marketing and users' support purposes. Albeit the discussion got stopped somewhere, the idea is already implemented in some sense through the many different sites and portals about OOo in specific languages and countries. CollabNet is not that easy to use, after all....

German Poster Contest for OpenOffice.org: congratulations to the winners!

The OpenOffice.org Schools Project Mascot Competition was won by Andrea Maggioni of Italy. Thanks to Ian Lynch for this contest that was made possible by the OOoEdu initiative

(http://marketing.openoffice.org/education/schools/).

Live from Japan: The OpenOffice.org's Official Users Guide will be available on the 23rd of April in the bookstores of Japan, thanks to the members of the Japanese Native-Lang Project.

Wal-Mart teams with Sun on Linux PCs

"Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has begun selling PCs manufactured by Microtel Computer Systems Inc. this week featuring Sun Microsystems Inc.'s alternative operating system based on Linux and its StarOffice productivity software, according to Wal-Mart's Web site.

Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS) is available in Microtel PCs with processors from both Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The systems are being sold on Walmart.com at prices ranging from $298 to $798, depending on configuration."

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,91813,00.html

OpenOffice.org at Ministry of Health

By using OpenOffice.org, the Congress of Brazil could save 5 million reals, i.e. 15% of the IT budget. In addition, the Ministry of Health will migrate this year 30% of their computers to free software. Another very interesting initiative: thousand government employees will get training about free software in April so that they can share their knowledge with their colleagues, once the migration has been completed.

French Article:

http://linuxfr.org/2004/04/08/15959.html

One of the Spanish source articles explicitly mentions OpenOffice.org and Linux. According to that article Argentina is also not renewing their contracts with Microsoft.

Spanish Article:

http://softwarelibre.cl/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=311&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

310,000 copies of Catalan version distributed

"Next Sunday 25 of April, one of the biggest newspapers in Spain, el Periodico de Catalunya[1] is going to give away for free a copy of a CD-ROM that we at Softcatalà put together with software localised into Catalan. The Catalan government is paying the cost of producing the copies of the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM includes OpenOffice.org 1.1, Abiword, Mozilla, FireFox, and other free software tools and documents localised into Catalan by the people arround the Softcatalà community. Windows and GNU/Linux versions are included.

You can see how the CD-ROM looks like at:

http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas/cd.jpg

The newspaper has produced 310.000 copies of the CD-ROM This is the large action never done in Catalonia to distribute free software to end-users. It's so cool to put some many hours of efforts in translation and software developers in the end-users hands!.

Regards,

Jesús.

[1] http://www.elperiodico.es/”

Source: Jesús Corrius (jesus@softcatala.org)

10,000 Seats in Finance

"... i am in the middle of a huge OO implementation on a Spanish bank. We are done with the pilot which calls to implement 10.000 OOo suites in a major bank in Spain. Hopefully, within a month I will forward the business case which will be translated into 3 different languages to be used in other countries as an example of OO TCO."

Source: aromeo@lared.es (found on the OpenOffice.org marketing list)

The Israeli finance ministry plans to distribute 150,000 copies of OpenOffice

"According to the site, the goal of this step, is to encourage free choice, and to lessen the digital gap. It note the need for support of organizations that can help the distribution to the general population using Internet sites, advertising in newspapers and internal distribution within the organizations themselves. There is also a need, according to the site, for training using the Internet and telephone support."

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/9576/

Gati Limited (India) uses OpenOffice.org

"Gati Limited – A leader in the express cargo industry in India – is reaping remarkable benefits from its gargantuan 200 man year effort spent in designing its own customized ERP solution, called GEMS (Gati Enterprise Management Solution).

[...]

Describing how Gati has taken the Open Source trend forward, Ravikumar explained, “We have 1000 desktops out of which hardly 10 users are on MS Office. The remaining have migrated to OpenOffice. We are also using iPlanet for our mail server, instead of MS Exchange.”"

http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/index.jsp?section=News&subsection=Business&subsection_code=1&file=template1.jsp&storyid=846

French OpenOffice.org Add-ons

"Some new tools are also available in french :

Cart'OOo : a fabulous tutorial assorted with map libraries for the Gallery which allow you to create maps with Draw

PincOOo : will allow you to reproduce the style in the same that the brush do it in Microsoft Office

Multisave : in only one clic, save your documents in the file format of you choice SXW/SXC - PDF - DOC/XLS

SHOOo : a PHP class which allow to create a HTML Table and a Calc document from the result of a SQL query or from the content of a PHP table, illustrating the XML file format of OpenOffice.org and how it could be processed out of the suite."

Different web pages with screen shots:

http://www.framasoft.net/rubrique90.html

http://home.t-online.de/home/gfriege/dmaths/

http://soshg.free.fr/cartooo/demo1.htm

http://oootools.free.fr/fooox/

http://www.jdisoftware.co.uk/pages/epdf-home.php

Source: Sophie Gautier (sgauti@firstnet1.com)

Linux User & Developer Awards - Best Open Source Project: OpenOffice.org

"Linux User & Developer magazine last night announced the winners of this year's prestigious Linux User & Developer Awards at a gala event held in London's Royal Lancaster Hotel. Hosted by comedian and renowned comedy scriptwriter, Barry Cryer, the night was a spectacular success - the biggest and best awards show in the Linux industry. There were 12 panel-nominated award categories, with best Open Source Project going to Sun Microsystems for OpenOffice.org."

http://www.btnsn.com/btnsn/pr_view.asp?id=5276&dt=&cid=8652

March 2004

OASIS Milestone Reached

"An important milestone in the evolution of a universal XML file format has been achieved. In a unanimous vote, the OASIS Open Office XML Format TC has formally approved the Open Office Specification 1.0 Draft 12.

The completed phase one specification now goes before the OASIS general membership for comment and approval. The discussion period and vote date have yet to be determined."

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgId=1122898

OpenOffice.org BizDev Project

"We are proud to announce the opening of the Business Development project of OpenOffice.org (BizDev) The goals of this project are to build a business partners' network around OpenOffice.org .

In this regard the BizDev project is the place where commercial leads, and business and consulting information can be discussed. It is a project for services professionals who are looking for customers, projects, and for contributing the way they want. Several companies have already joined the BizDev project. Among them is the Olliance Group, based in Palo Alto, California, a consulting firm pushing the adoption of Open Source Software and open standards in large companies. They believe in this project and think that letting businesses participate and generate wealth around OpenOffice.org is a major asset in today's industry.

"We are seeing and hearing a need for a more supportive and integrated approach from the community to address users requirements in deploying Open Source solutions. Creating a project where service providers can present themselves, communicate, and discuss customer’s needs and topics such as “best practices” is a bold, innovative, and needed step by OpenOffice.org” said Andrew Aitken, Managing Partner, Olliance Group, a leading OSS strategic consulting firm.

As a first step, the BizDev project volunteers have built a business directory called the Consultants' Directory (http://bizdev.openoffice.org/consultants.html ) where consulting businesses get listed in order to maximize their visibility to the public and the community. This list already provides a large amount of information and is still growing."

Source: Charles-H. Schulz (BizDev Project Lead)

http://bizdev.openoffice.org/

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1RC3

"Release Candidate 3 of OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 is ready for download.

http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.1rc3/index.html

It incorporates numerous bug fixes and is cleaner than RC1. However, we are asking you, the community, to make sure that there are no outstanding issues remaining.

Therefore, please download RC3 and test it. If you find any bugs or regressions, file an issue describing it. To learn how to file an issue, visit our QA Project:

http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html

This build is so far in English."

Source: Louis Suarez-Potts

OOo 1.1 Portuguese Native-Lang translation

The N-L Portuguese team released the OpenOffice.org 1.1 in Portuguese.

For about about 4 months we've worked in the glossary and on the HUGE GSI file of OOo1.1. We've faced some problemas with the build, mostly because of the Windows build and some template problems, that Olivier Hallot from the PT-BR Team helped us solve it. For him, one big hug for the important and essential help.

Also, the QA released 3 public RC's, on which the last one, had been downloaded in 3 days, 2.000 times for Windows and 400 for Linux.

More information can be found here (in Portuguese):

http://pt.openoffice.org/html/ooopt-marketing-pressrelease-1.1f_PT.html

Source: Louis Suarez-Potts

FontOOo 1.0

"Please find here the official announcement of FontOOo 1.0

Based on DicOOo principle, this tool let you install free fonts into OOo (no system installation is performed).

You'll find FontOOo at: http://oooconv.free.fr/fontooo

This is an official call for testers and translators in the same spirit as DicOOo.

For contributing to your native lang translation, please refer to issue

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=25372

Please note also that german team is preparing an HowTo.

http://www.christianmarkgraf.de/ooo/tryouts/FontOOo/fontooo.html

Thanks to all translators and hard workers. Especially

Kevin Hendricks, Rolf Meyer and Christian Markgraf"

http://oooconv.free.fr/fontooo

Source: Laurent Godard

OOo Education Mascot Competition

There is a competition to choose the OOo Education mascot!!

It only takes a few seconds to vote, and the mascot will help in publicing OOo to schools.

Vote here:

http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/openoffice/mascot/vote.cgi

Microsoft Is Facing Long-Term Adjustment

"Forrester's Schadler said his research team recently interviewed officials of 140 major North American companies about their software plans. Of those, 65 are using open-source applications, and 20 are planning to.

And 12 of the 140 are using an open-source competitor of Office, known as OpenOffice, while eight are planning to."

http://www.bizreport.com/article.php?art_id=6557

City of Haarlem moving to OpenOffice.org

The city of Haarlem (approx. 150.000 inhabitants) is about to migrate from Office97 to OpenOffice.

More information can be found on:

http://www.ososs.nl/article.jsp?article=8703

Singapore Ministry of Education and Argonne National Laboratory Turn To Java(TM) Enterprise System for Dramatic Cost Savings

"Coupled with the growing worldwide adoption of Sun's StarOffice(TM) productivity suite, now in use by millions of students and faculty in more than 165,000 school districts, higher education institutions and ministries of education in 21 countries, the compelling advantage of Sun's software solutions is gaining a foothold in the education market. The rapid adoption of StarOffice is fulfilling Sun's vision to equip students and teachers worldwide with access to low-cost office productivity software based on open source technology."

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK6.story&STORY=/www/story/03-02-2004/0002120063&EDATE=TUE+Mar+02+2004,+03:01+AM

City of Lille considering migration to OpenOffice.org

The City of Lille is requesting proposals for the creation of an OpenOffice.org migration study. French web page:

http://www.lillemetropole.fr/page.php?P=data/services_interactifs/sites_utiles/services/procedures_adaptees/&Item=3293

http://www.lillemetropole.fr/page.php?P=data/services_interactifs/sites_utiles/

French Officials Eye Open-Source Apps

"The French government will install open source software on the desktop as part of Project ADELE, a plan to computerize much of the country's administration by 2007, a government official says."

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114759,pg,1,00.asp

Haryana goes the open-source way with Sun

"He said the Haryana government had decided to adopt the software because of the 'monopolistic and whimsical behaviour adopted by Microsoft for its Office software.'"

http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2004/mar/03sun.htm

ICICI OneSource Dumps Microsoft Office For Sun

[N.B. 1 lak = 100,000. Therefore 72 lakh = 7.2 million. The currency used is rupees]

"ICICI OneSource, a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services provider, has undertaken a bold move of switching its desktops from Microsoft Office to Sun’s StarOffice 7, saving a whopping Rs 72 lakh in the bargain."

"Regarding the obvious compatibility qualms that first time users have - as Microsoft Office is by far the established standard used worldwide – Prashanth said, “There are many, but so far we have faced a few with respect to Word and Excel formats when advanced features are employed.”"

"Apart from its lower price, another advantage of StarOffice 7 over Microsoft Office is its cross-platform support. Where Office 2003 will run only on Windows 2000 and XP, StarOffice 7 supports Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP, as well as Linux and Solaris. The software offers functionality to enable export to PDF, and the Macromedia Flash format, and supports 10 languages."

http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/index.jsp?section=News&subsection=Business&subsection_code=1&file=template1.jsp&storyid=720

BharateeyaOO.o Gives Open Office a 'Desi' Push

"BharateeyaOO.o (BharateeyaOpenOffice.org), a project initiated by Bangalore-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) - formerly known as NCST – has gained significant headway in making OpenOffice accessible to regional language users in India.

The group - founded about two and a half years back – has a primary objective to internationalize and localize OpenOffice, Sun’s Open Source initiative."

"The team incorporated Complex Text Layout (CTL) support for Indian Languages into OpenOffice, and Kannada and Telgu versions of the software are next on the agenda."

Localisation effort at:

http://hi.openoffice.org

http://ta.openoffice.org

http://www.ncb.ernet.in/bharateeyaoo

Story at:

http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/index.jsp?section=News&subsection=Business&subsection_code=1&file=template1.jsp&storyid=716

Namibian OSS workshop produces Kiswahili dictionary

"Kiswahili speakers can now spellcheck documents in their own language. A group of developers taking part in the Africa Source joined forces - and resources - to develop the first-ever Kiswahili dictionary."

"During a series of workshops and a skills sharing session at the Africa Source gathering, Githeko and Bailey worked on cleaning up the wordlist and preparing it to create the Kiswahili dictionary. During one of the mid-week sessions the final dictionary was created and released to the world of OpenOffice.org users."

http://www.translate.org.za/

http://www.tectonic.co.za/default.php?action=view&id=281&topic=Open%20Source

German distributor sells more than a million copies of Sun's StarOficce

"Sun Microsystems says that German OEM software distributor Markement has sold more than one million copies of Sun's StarOffice. The milestone marks more that 40 million copies distributed to date, and puts StarOffice and its open source counterpart, OpenOffice.org, "as one of the most popular choices among consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide," according to the company."

"Markement, based in Stuttgart, Germany, sells StarOffice both as a standalone program and as part of its popular PCSuite office bundle. This German productivity package also includes CorelDraw Essentials, Norton Anti-Virus 2004 and Marco Polo TravelRouting Europe 2004, a European travel-planning program."

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2163896330.html

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1551056,00.asp

Additional reporting:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040318/sfth016_1.html

http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/index.jsp?section=News&subsection=Business&subsection_code=1&file=template1.jsp&storyid=744

OpenOffice.org Magazine

"As I've mentioned before, an OpenOffice.org magazine (one-shot only, not periodical) will be out here in Turkey on Saturday, this week. It mentions OpenOffice.org's most wanted features, along with other practical tutorials about Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, HTML and Math.

You may want to see the cover page on http://www.gorkemcetin.com/kapak.jpg for informational purposes. It's in Turkish however."

Source: Görkem Çetin

OpenOffice debuts bizdev community

"The OpenOffice project has created an online meeting place for developers, consultants and business users of the OpenOffice and Sun's StarOffice office suites.

Covering both OpenOffice and Sun's StarOffice the bizdev.openoffice.org site aims build a network and provide a meeting place between all those hoping to develop and use alternatives to Microsoft's Office. As a first step the bizdev group has opened a directory of consultants who specialise in open source office products. The group also allows members to set up their own mailing lists to generate sales leads and possible partnerships."

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/news_story.php?id=54031

http://bizdev.openoffice.org/

Pravakta Plug-in for OpenOffice.org 1.1 Writer

The Matrubhasha group at CDAC (Formerly NCST) Bangalore India has been working on building Speech Synthesis products for Indian Languages.

Pravakta is a speech plug-in that has been developed recently for OpenOffice.org 1.1 Writer.

Pravakta can be downloaded from:

http://www.ncb.ernet.in/matrubhasha/products.shtml#pravakta

Source: R.K.V.S.Raman (leader of Matrubhasha group at CDAC

Bangalore India)

XML Matters: XML for word processors

"Free software and XML document formats are a natural pairing. The inherent readability of XML just makes interchange and format specification easier, and the wide availability of XML libraries makes creation of new tools simple. Moreover, looking at these word processor formats has really helped me to see the modularity benefits of namespaces -- when done correctly, namespaces can leverage the work done by many groups of independent developers.

However, XML itself only goes so far. For example, Microsoft is also moving towards an XML format for future versions of MS Word; but in contrast to the openness of the OASIS/OpenOffice.org or AbiWord formats, Microsoft is surrounding its format with patent applications, and putting a veil of secrecy around the format variations (plus it uses cryptic tag and attribute names rather than self-documenting ones).

XML by itself does not really mean open, but fortunately, the developers of KOffice, AbiWord, and OpenOffice.org have done a generally wonderful job of obtaining openness with XML (albeit, the wild world of community development still leaves occasional impedance mismatches in, for example, DTDs)."

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-matters33/

Microsoft releases OpenOffice.org 1.1 Competitive Guide

Why You Should Choose MS Office Over OO.org

http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/25/1950234.shtml?tid=109

Microsoft displays fear, uncertainty, and doubt toward OpenOffice.org

http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/03/27/0134204.shtml?tid=132&tid=82&tid=93

Microsoft FUD Machine Aims at OpenOffice.org

http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/27/1919256.shtml?tid=109&tid=185&tid=187

Comments/opinions reg. the OpenOffice.org 1.1 Competitive Guide

"1. Ease of Use

Due to OpenOffice.org's similarity to Microsoft Office most people don't need a lot of retraining. Besides, there is a huge focus on usability for the next major release. On the other hand, OpenOffice.org has some superior tools and concepts like the built-in one-click PDF export, the Navigator and the Stylist.

Recently a German computer magazine tested different word processors and came to the conclusion that OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are superior with respect to the creation of long documents like a diploma thesis.

With respect to database support, OpenOffice.org provides a powerful database frontend that can be used with many different database systems in the backend. Besides, in many cases the migration to a new desktop platform also turned out to be a good time to consolidate the huge number of hard to maintain local MS Access databases into one web based platform that uses a secure and performant server database in the backend.

2. Tailored Solutions

Due to the fact that the source code of OpenOffice.org is available for everybody and that the file format for all applications is an open XML file format it is possible to create very tailored solutions based on OpenOffice.org. A list of companies that have already created innovative solutions based on OpenOffice.org can be found on the OpenOffice.org developer web page at

http://development.openoffice.org/.

Integrations and integration prototypes from SAP, FileNet, Software AG and others were demo'd at CeBIT (Hannover, Germany) last week.

3. Support When Needed

Support for OpenOffice.org is available from large global companies as well as a huge and fast growing number of small local companies.

A list of companies providing support can be found at

http://support.openoffice.org/index.html z.B. StarOffice.

4. Better and Faster Work

Due to the fact that OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are used at many schools and universities less people need retraining simply because they have used OpenOffice.org or StarOffice right from the beginning. At the same time more and more software vendors are integrating their products with OpenOffice.org in order to simplify collaboration. In addition, OpenOffice.org is available on all

major desktop platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. This includes the open XML file format support.

5. Seamless Information Exchange

Not only does OpenOffice.org have quickly-improving import and export filters for Microsoft Office, it also supports the creation of popular exchange formats like PDF and Flash out of the box. In addition, OpenOffice.org is available for many operating systems and languages. Recipients of an OpenOffice.org file can simply download the latest version of the software for free in order to open and edit the document. Thus, nobody is forced to buy expensive software.

For e-mail based collaboration and calendaring a growing list of products is available including Mozilla, Evolution, Eudora, Glow and others. On the server side there is again the choice between free open source tools like OpenGroupware.org and commercial products like the groupware products from Sun Microsystems and Novell.

6. Easier Deployment and Maintenance

OpenOffice.org allows an unattended installation via scripts (so-called "reponse files"). In addition multiple vendors provide deployment and mangement solutions for their OpenOffice.org based products. A few examples are the StarOffice Configuration Manager and the Sun Control Station as well as Novell's Red Carpet. In order to minimize migration costs different companies including SCAI and Sun Microsystems are working on migration tools.

7. Security

The virus issues of the last few months have clearly shown that almost exclusively systems with Windows and MS Office were affected. Although no operating system can guarantee invulnerability regarding virusses, the combination of OpenOffice.org and a non-Windows operating systems has proven to be very secure.

8. Investment You Can Trust

The OpenOffice.org file format is the basis of the OASIS Open XML File Format which will be used as the default file format in future versions of OpenOffice.org. Therefore, the file format is controlled by a standards body instead of a single vendor. In addition, the availablity of the source code in connection with strong support through the OpenOffice.org community and companies like Sun Microsystems ensure ongoing innovation and improvement."

Source: Stephanie Berger, stephi.berger@gmx.net

Microsoft Is Facing Long-Term Adjustment

"Forrester's Schadler said his research team recently interviewed officials of 140 major North American companies about their software plans. Of those, 65 are using open-source applications, and 20 are planning to.

And 12 of the 140 are using an open-source competitor of Office, known as OpenOffice, while eight are planning to."

http://www.bizreport.com/article.php?art_id=6557

Third package announced for PC Gemilang project

"The Energy, Communications and Multimedia Ministry and the Association of the Computer and Multimedia Industry of Malaysia (Pikom) have announced a third package for their PC Gemilang programme, which seeks to make available affordable PCs to the Malaysian public."

"The PC Gemilang project, which officially kicks off next Monday, was announced earlier this month with two models: An RM988 (US$260) PC running a Linux-based operating system and bundled with the OpenOffice productivity suite; and an RM1,147 (US$302) desktop with the Bahasa Malaysia version of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and Works Suite 2004."

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2004/3/12/technology/7525432&sec=technology

http://www.idg.com.sg/idgwww.nsf/0/954F93F62C284D3F48256E4C00333C91?OpenDocument

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5168029.html

StarOffice takes on Microsoft

"Some pundits, including Gartner Dataquest’s Michael Silver, say that one key to the success of StarOffice 7--now available in Linux, Windows and Solaris flavors--is its open XML file structure. Many widely available XML tools--from Sun or not-- can be used to edit files. Plus, it has an inexpensive price tag. Those factors together, he told internetnews.com, could translate into a 10% chunk taken from Microsoft’s currentdominance in the market segment."

http://www.pdfzone.com/news/877-PDFzone_news.html

Linux Saves Big Money

"Pittsburgh-based Maronda Homes now runs desktop applications on its 550 PCs with OpenOffice, Linux software downloaded off the Web from www.openoffice.org."

"The basic idea is that running OpenOffice is cheaper, and over time the desktop applications will develop," says Mark Piccolo, Maronda's director of management information systems."

http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/33013.html

HP Starts Pushing Desktop Linux

"The company is working on a new desktop kit based on the 2.6 Linux kernel that will offer a choice of KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.4 or the house-brand MandrakeGalaxy 2 desktop environments as well as OpenOffice 1.1."

http://www.linuxworld.com/story/44054.htm

Novell to offer users a Windows experience on a Linux desktop

"The office productivity package is derived from the open source Openoffice software.

Gaines said Novell's plan was to allow users to exchange information easily with Microsoft Office and Exchange."

"He said the Ximian Openoffice suite allows users to exchange documents with MS Office. For instance, Powerpoint slides can be run and edited on the Ximian system."

http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=129147&liArticleTypeID=1&liCategoryID=1&liChannelID=126&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage=1

Life after Microsoft - One firm's complete conversion to open source

"After a run-in with Microsoft and the BSA, Sterling Ball converted all his company's operations to open-source software. He explains why he'll ever go back to Redmond's products"

"But since jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software -- and still lived to tell the tale."

"Ball's IT crew settled on a potpourri of open-source software -- Red Hat's version of Linux, the OpenOffice office suite, Mozilla's Web browser -- plus a few proprietary applications that couldn't be duplicated by open source."

http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020472,39115887-2,00.htm

February 2004

Lao Native-Lang Project announced

"We have the pleasure to announce the opening of the Lao Native-Lang project (http://lo.openoffice.org), led by Mr. Anousak Souphavanh. Thanks to the work of his team, OpenOffice.org has extended its reach up to Laos, a small and beautiful country, birthplace of a magnificient and antique culture."

Source: Charles-H. Schulz, Lead of the Native-Lang Confederation

Arabic & Hebrew Projects announced

"Today we have the pleasure to announce the opening of the Arabic and Hebrew Native-Lang projects. The Arabic Project (http://ar.openoffice.org) is led by Mr Khayat and backed by the Arabeyes free-software community, an important player and supporter of free software and OpenOffice.org in the Arabic world. The Hebrew project has been created by Tkos, an Israeli company who is also in charge of localizing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice but who managed to set up a real and lively community of users, developers and marketers.

These two projects show the growing influence of OpenOffice.org in the Middle-East and we are delighted that such prestigious cultures and people have adopted OpenOffice.org as their free and open productivity suite .

Source: Charles-H. Schulz, Lead of the Native-Lang Confederation

Misc Native-Lang Project News

On Saturday the 7th of February, the Native-Lang Confederation has seen four new projects' proposals who have all been accepted in due time and are currently in setup phase:

-The Armenian native-lang project

-The Hungarian native-lang project

-The Norwegian native-lang project

-The Sango native-lang project (from Central Africa).

This day has marked the highest growth rate for the Native-Lang Confederation and brings potentially ten of thousands of OpenOffice.org users and hundreds of volunteers to our community.

Source: Charles-H. Schulz, Lead of the Native-Lang Confederation

Japanese Announcement

The Japanese Language Project have launched a web-based message board for help regarding OpenOffice.org. The system is also linked to a mailing list providing further options for access. More information at the Japanese Language Project: http://ja.openoffice.org/

Courtesy of Takaaki Higuchi (www.linux.or.jp, www.freestandards.org, sun.co.jp)

ISO announcment

There is a new OpenOffice.org ISO available for download. The main changes are to the MacOS X version, where both 1.0.3 and 1.1.0 versions are now included. It can be found in the /contrib/iso/1.1.0 of any OOo download mirror. Go to http://www.openoffice.org/ to find download sites.

Courtesy of Alex Fisher, co-lead CD-ROM project

Linux and OpenOffice.org at the City of Paris

According to the article below the system integrator Unilog got the task to create a report for the government that eveluates the usage of Linux and OpenOffice.org on the 17,000 PC's at the City of Paris. The French government is envisaging to migrate 5-15% of all PC's to open source technologies.

http://www.clubic.com/n/n11557.html

Indian insurance company shifts 10,000 desktops to StarOffice

"India's second largest insurer, United India Insurance Company, is moving 10,000 desktops to Sun Microsystems' office suite StarOffice.

A media release from Sun quoted UIIC's IT assistant general manager S.M. Victor John as saying the insurer had selected StarOffice 7 software because it matched the company's technical specifications and was competitively priced."

"A Sun spokesperson said the 10,000 desktops being replaced were running mostly Office 95. "One of the reasons why UIIC chose StarOffice is due to cost savings. StarOffice only costs anywhere from $25-$60 for enterprises while Microsoft Office sells their Office suite for hundreds of dollars," the spokesperson said.

"StarOffice's functionality and compatibility to Microsoft Office was also a major factor in the decision as well as multi-platform support - Linux, Solaris, Windows - for greater flexibility and choice."

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/06/1075854037075.html

Aust users back desktop Linux

"A newly-conducted survey of Australian and New Zealand tech users has lent weight to Linux' desktop prospects, with more than three-quarters of respondents saying it will improve its strength in the area.

The survey -- conducted by tech expert Graeme Philipson in February -- found that almost two-thirds (61.3 percent) believed the open-source operating system would get "a little" stronger on the desktop, while 22.5 percent said it would get "a lot" stronger.

[...]

Smith attributes the popularity of Linux in business use to the management and security advantages a company has when using the system, making it the main alternative to proprietary operating systems.

"On Linux a company or organisation has full control over their IT" said Smith, adding: "There are practically no Linux viruses to be worried about and any patches are developed incredibly fast and available immediately". "

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39116120,00.htm

Apache Forrest Support for OpenOffice.org

"Forrest is an XML standards-oriented project documentation framework based on Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images and other resources. Forrest uses these to render the XML source content into a website via command-line, robot, or a dynamic web application."

http://xml.apache.org/forrest

"Apache Forrest supports OpenOffice.org 1.1 Writer documents as source documents. Generally every OpenOffice.org Writer document can be used as source file but if you want support for all elements the documentv12.dtd supports you have to use template names which are supported during the transformation process."

http://xml.apache.org/forrest/oowriter.html

OpenOffice.org Flash Intro

"Finally got around to applying the [GNU Free Documentation License (FDL)] to the OOo 1.1 Flash intro, so everyone who has Flash MX 2004 can now make their own versions (translated, etc).

At some point we should create a nice description page, but we haven't done that just yet.

The source Flash file for the OOo 1.1 Intro is here:

http://www.digitaldistribution.com/community/goodwilltoallmankind/ooo11_intro_en_001.fla

A Flash intro generated from it is here:

http://www.digitaldistribution.com/community/goodwilltoallmankind/ooointro11en.swf

Those URLS should all be on one line, but may have wrapped due to text

formatting.

Hope this helps the native lang teams especially. Would someone also be

ok to let them know about this, as I'm not on any of their mailing

list(s) just yet? "

(Source: dev@marketing.openoffice.org)

20% for OpenOffice.org

"However, an upstart open-source productivity suite also made a strong showing this year among our readers. Twenty percent of our readers proclaimed OpenOffice 1.1 as the top small business productivity suite, which just goes to show that smaller companies are also open to the idea of Linux on the desktop. Available for free to Windows, Linux, and Mac users, all the open-source community asks is that programmers pass along any improvements they make to the source code. (Read our review.)"

http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/news/article.php/3300821

StarOffice 7 review by PC Magazine

"Can Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 7 supplant Microsoft Office on your desktop? With previous versions being slow and buggy, you'd probably answer no. But the speed, power, and simplicity of the latest version—combined with its minuscule price ($79.95 direct)—may change your mind. It's certainly worth a look for budget-constrained government or enterprise buyers, as well as small businesses and individual users who need to buy an office suite with their own money. And attention education buyers: Sun will send you the software for just the cost of the media and shipping."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1440803,00.asp

English Documenation for Perl/OODoc Module available

"Perl/OODoc modules provide an object-oriented interface for reading and editing of OpenOffice.org documents by Perl programs without having to use OpenOffice.org or StarOfficeTM directly.

Their objective is to offer programmers a concise and reasonably high-level language, allowing the manipulation of document objects without having to know the details of data representation used in OpenOffice.org files or of XML programming interfaces."

http://www.genicorp.fr/devel/oodoc/

Opening Open Formats with XSLT

"In Jon Udell's keynote speech at the conference, he mentioned that the only Microsoft Office 2003 application that would lack an XML output option was the mail program, but he forgot another one, PowerPoint. I was looking forward to some sort of Save As XML feature in PowerPoint so that I could create the kind of speaker notes that I like from XML versions of PowerPoint presentations, and it looks like I won't get this ability for a while, at least not directly from Microsoft.

I decided to try it with OpenOffice, the free, open source, multi-platform office application suite. Once I saw the XML that its slide presentation program created, it took me less time to write a stylesheet that did exactly what I wanted than it took to download OpenOffice over the conference hotel's T1 line."

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/02/04/tr-xml.html

Microsoft's Office XML lags on Mac

"Microsoft is readying a new version of Office for Macintosh for release in the first half of 2004 — one which doesn’t support many of the much-touted XML features of its Windows cousin, Office 2003."

http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/6E0DEE420F766E7ECC256E21007B9E28?OpenDocument

StarOffice 7 available for Solaris x86

"Sun Microsystems, Inc., (Nasdaq: SUNW - News) the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, today announced that its StarOffice(TM) 7 software, an open-source based, comprehensive, multi-platform office productivity suite, is available immediately for the growing enterprise-class Solaris(TM) Operating System (OS) x86 Platform Edition. Customers seeking a proven, alternative desktop solution can now benefit from the familiar UNIX® environment and the reliable, highly available, scalable and predictable Solaris OS on their x86 systems."

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040204/sfw076_1.html

KDE integrates OpenOffice.org

"In this interview, Jan Holesovsky, author and leader of the KDE.OpenOffice.org project, now employed by SUSE, gives us a glimpse of what to expect in terms of OpenOffice.org integration on your KDE desktop."

http://dot.kde.org/1075705744/

Sun Lends Support to OpenOffice.org

"Sun Microsystems now offers Sun Software Support services to openoffice.org customers. According to Chris van Niekerk, regional support manager, Sun Microsystems SA, this move enhances the company's current support for the StarOffice productivity suite, and provides customers with additional choice and opportunity to reduce costs."

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114616,00.asp

http://www.sun.com/service/support/software/openoffice/

Star Can Save Millions; But Look Before You Leap

"Speaking to CXOtoday, K.P. Unnikrishnan, country head – marketing, Sun Microsystems India, said, "For an enterprise, with lets say 100 desktops, Star Office 7 would cost around Rs 4,680 per license, as against Rs 14,000 per license for Microsoft Office 2003."

In CIO lingo, this would translate into a budgetary saving of approximately 65 %, as Sun’s office suite costs roughly 1/3 rd of its Microsoft counterpart. "

http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/index.jsp?section=News&subsection=Business&subsection_code=1&file=template1.jsp&storyid=632

January 2004

Texan city runs 'nonemotional' Linux pilot

"For the Linux desktop, Austin technicians are "just trying to make it actually function in our world," Collins said, but OpenOffice has made it further. It's running on about 30 Windows computers, including Collins' own, and he plans to expand the test to more sophisticated computer users soon.

"I forgot I was using it... everything I need to do I can do," Collins said, though he noted that he chiefly needs only basic features.

Austin has about 6,000 Windows computers, 5,200 of which are covered by a Microsoft enterprise software support agreement that expires at the end of 2004, Collins said. That agreement cost more than $3m.

It's likely that by using OpenOffice on his own department's computers, he will be able to move about 100 Microsoft Office licences to other computer users who need it without having to pay extra, he said."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39118725,00.htm

Sun touts contract with Office Depot

"Office Depot also will use a number of Sun services for managing its information technology resources. The retailer has also agreed to sells Sun's StarOffice productivity software in its stores."

http://news.com.com/2100-1010-5130899.html

Norwegian soon to become a native language project!

The Norwegian translation project (www.openofficeorg.no) will soon start the process of becoming a native language project. With impressive speed OpenOffice.org has been translated into the two official Norwegian languages.

Version 1.1 is available for Windows, while the Linux version will probably be completed early in March.

There is a rapidly growing interest in OpenOfficeorg.no. The Windows versions of OpenOffice.org 1.0 and 1.1 have been downloaded 26 000 times so far. In February, one of Norway's largest county councils will distribute OpenOffice.org to all their high school students. Also, several textbooks and user manuals have been written.

The Ministry of Education and Research has donated NOK 300 000 (the equivalent of 2000 man-hours) for further translation of the help functions. Israel snubs Microsoft, moves to open-source software

"For its part, the Israeli government has also decided to encourage the development of lower-priced alternatives to Microsoft applications to encourage computer use across Israel, Cohen said. "We have worked with Sun and IBM on designing a Hebrew version of OpenOffice software and distributing it as an alternative to Office. It depends on the government office, but the government is now using Office, Linux and the OpenOffice software."

OpenOffice is free, open-source office software that was originally based on StarOffice from Sun Microsystems Inc.

The adoption of OpenOffice by the government has already raised interest in the software among Israelis, including those who normally aren't interested in technology, said Shoshannah Forbes, who works as a software tester for OpenOffice.org, the organization that develops the open-source program.

Microsoft software is very expensive in Israel, and interest in OpenOffice is such that Forbes has been asked about it by complete strangers in her local video store, she said. "I was asked where I worked, and when I said I worked for OpenOffice, everyone was asking about it. It's been all over the press here." "

http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,88800,00.html

Kinko and OpenOffice.org

"While I was helping out a friend with her Linux install she related to me how OOo "saved her bacon" recently.

She had been working on a brochure for a local library that needed to be printed in a number of different languages including chinese, hindi, and arabic. She had prepared the document in Word and took the file to Kinko's (a copy shop) for printing. They did not have the fonts to print out the non-western characters. She rushed back to her house and opened up the document in OpenOffice.org 1.1. With some minor reformatting she saved the file as a PDF which she took back to Kinko's. They were able to complete the printing job from the pdf.

I've asked her to write this up and submit it to OOo as a testimonial. Where or whom should it go to?

PS - She likes OOo and uses Calc and the dbase function to help run her business. She uses Word only because she needed a good thesaurus, which OOo lacks. If the thesaurus was better she'd stop using Word altogether. If she didn't need to use Word she said she wouldn't need to use Windows either.

PPS - For those who don't know, the term "saving one's bacon" has nothing to do with hogs or pork products."

Source: OpenOffice.org mailing list dev@marketing.openoffice.org

Government open source deployments you don't hear about

" I know of at least a dozen goverment open source deployments I have been begged not to write about, not in the spy movie, "If I tell you I'll have to kill you!" sense, but because the people responsible for them worry that excess publicity might kill their efforts to run their agencies' computers with the most reliable and cost-effective software they can find."

http://www.newsforge.com/trends/03/12/23/0056245.shtml?tid=136&tid=137&tid=2&tid=82&tid=94

2003 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners Announced

Office Suite of the Year -- OpenOffice.org (79.51%)

Word Processor of the Year -- swriter (OpenOffice.org) (66.86%)

Spreadsheet of the Year -- scalc (OpenOffice.org) (54.30%)

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK6.story&STORY=/www/story/01-12-2004/0002087216&EDATE=MON+Jan+12+2004,+07:47+AM

OSNews 2003 Awards -- Our Favorites This Year

"Most profound application of the year: I am torn between Photoshop CS and OpenOffice.org (while not as full featured as MS Office or even Star Office, it is free and so that compensates.)"

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5540

2003 OSDir Editor's Choice Award

OpenOffice.org was awarded the Editor's Choice Award for Best of Mac & Windows, and Best overall Desktop App

http://osdir.com/Article198.phtml

Product of the Year 2003

The swiss magazine Infoweek.ch chooses OpenOffice.org 1.1 as the product of the year 2003 in the category "Office Software".

http://www.apple.com/chde/hotnews/pdf/infoweek03.pdf

December 2003

OpenOffice.org got a new "face"

The OpenOffice.org website has changed its look and is now easier to use and navigate. We would like to thank the volunteer website team for their work, in particular, Project Co-Lead Kay Schenk and chief designer Cristian Driga; and, in no particular order, Ed Buck, John McCreesh, Akshay Dayal, G. Roderick Singleton, Jacqueline McNally, and Louis Suarez-Potts. If things are bad, join the website project and help fix it. ;-)

Russian Native-Lang Project Announced

"The Native-Lang family has the pleasure to welcome its latest newcomer, the Russian Native-Lang Project. Led by Anatoly A. Yakushin and Rail Aliev, this project was also created by the people of AltLinux in Russia. The Russian Project is very important to OOo not only because of its symbolic meaning but also because of the number of Russian speaking people worldwide who already use OpenOffice.org or are potential users of the suite."

Sun Microsystems launches enterprise support for OpenOffice.org

"Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), founder and primary sponsor of the open-source project OpenOffice.org, today announced it will offer Sun(SM) Software Support services to OpenOffice.org customers. Ranked as a leading provider of online support services by Summit Strategies, Inc., Boston, Mass., Sun Services delivers proven solutions with presence in more than 126 countries. This move enhances Sun's current support for the StarOffice(TM) productivity suite, provides customers additional choice and opportunity to reduce costs, and underscores Sun's deep commitment to open-source and standards-based software."

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK6.story&STORY=/www/story/12-03-2003/0002068366&EDATE=WED+Dec+03+2003,+02:38+AM

Scripting Framework is Available

"The Scripting Framework is available for evaluation from the latest OpenOffice.org Developer build at

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/680

The main highlights are

Scripting Framework available in build ( no need for separate install )

Support for JavaScript, Beanshell,Java, OpenOffice.org BASIC

Sample scripts in for supported languages.

Ability to assign macros/scripts written in these languages from Tools/Config dialogs.

Ability to assign events to the scripts/macros written in above languages from dialogs, forms, hyperlinks, objects graphics etc ( ala existing functionality from Office Basic )."

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=190

AOL ships PCs with OpenOffice.org based office suite

"The AOL PC comes with Microsoft Windows XP Home, but the first screen users see is an AOL-designed interface called the AOL Desktop. The PC also comes with an office productivity software package called AOL Office Powered by Sun, which is the StarOffice software suite developed by Sun Microsystems."

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,113771,00.asp

OpenOffice.org reduces the invoice of the police officers

The Ministry of the Interior gathers approximately 100000 working stations dispersed on all the territory and in very diverse structures from police stations to prefectures.

It is into 2000 that the Ministry began an evaluation of the software. Its absence of licence and especially its exemption from payment revealed it like a true opportunity for a deployment on a large scale.

In 2002, 15000 stations were deployed, primarily in the police stations. The suite is available on Cds and also in free remote loading on the Intranet. Christophe Cazin, engineer with the mission strategy and systems of control, announce besides that the remote loadings do not stop!

The technical support is ensured by internal forums, an Intranet, the OpenOffice.org site and its mailings lists. Christophe Cazin considers a deployment on 30000 stations within one year.

French Article: http://www.01net.com/article/222242.html

Retirement Pension Tool for Excel AND OpenOffice.org

"... About a month ago, a council worker asked for some help on our mailing list about an online tool to calculate retirement pension. This tool is distributed by our Ministry of civil services only on excel format and he needs it in OOo file format because he has migrated on OOo. Half an hour later, the community has helped him to convert the tool.

[...]

This thread has been reported to ADAE (Agency in charge with electronic usage in ministry)(thanks to Christophe Cazin but hush!) and a month later :

http://www.fonction-publique.retraites.gouv.fr/retraites/Public/simulateur_de_calcul/10560356143521

the tool is proposed in OOo file format and a link to download OOo ..."

[Source: Sophie Gautier]

UK’s Office of Government Commerce evaluating Sun Java Desktop System

"The five-year purchasing deal with the UK’s Office of Government Commerce will begin with compatibility trials for Java Desktop which, if successful, would mean up to 500,000 UK civil servants gradually being shifted away from Windows software to Sun’s low-cost open-source alternative."

http://www.business.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1341432003

More money for patients through OpenOffice.org and Linux

"NHS director general of IT Richard Granger, said in a statement: "Our evaluation of the Java Desktop System holds the promise of allowing a greater share of NHS funding to flow directly towards improved levels of Patient Service. If this solution were to prove effective we could save the NHS and the Taxpayer many millions of pounds whilst at the same time using rich and innovative software technology.""

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,39118351,00.htm

Schoolweb Targets 40 Institutions

"The project is a collaborative effort by Uconnect, the Ministry of Education and Sports, MTN and One2Net, and international partners Hewlett Packard, Advanced Interactive and Sun Microsystems. Advanced Interactive of Canada designed the SchoolWeb system for Canadian schools and modified it for Uganda.

[...]

Once installed and running, SchoolWeb becomes a fast and interactive learning resource centre. The SchoolWeb server comes with:

Open source software OpenOffice, programmes for website design, graphics, video streaming, a dictionary and database programmes."

http://allafrica.com/stories/200312030247.html

New Linux distribution "Impi" including OpenOffice.org

""Most developers in the "first world" countries have no idea of the conditions on our continent. Waiting around for a foreign developer or company to give us something that we need, merely echoes the legacy of colonialism. We need to dispose of that mindset," said Ross Addis in an e-mail interview.

[...]

Another unique feature of Impi Linux is that it will eventually have translations of South Africa's 11 official languages. But Ugandans and other Africans should not lose hope. Impi Linux is about choice. Get a free download from www.impi.org.za and modify it to suit you. So, is there hope for a version in Luganda or Swahili? "Of course. We will also be looking at adding the various African languages," he said."

http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=29276

Israeli employment agency switches to OpenOffice.org

"First out of the door is the Israeli employment agency, which will replace 550 out of 700 users with OpenOffice. The contract represents a hardware win for IBM. Some 150 staff will stay on Microsoft Office. For now, all the switchers will remain on Windows, running the Win32 version of the software libre equivalent of Microsoft Office."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34154.html

Sun lands 500,000 desktop Linux deal

"Signed in conjunction with the newly established China Standard Software Company, a consortium of Chinese government-supported firms, the deal could eventually stretch to 500 million desktops, which McNealy said was the Chinese government's aim.

[...]

McNealy said Sun would be pushing to win more governments over to its StarOffice range. "We're calling on every IT ministry on the planet. Stay tuned," he added."

http://www.vnunet.com/News/1149212

http://www.idg.com.hk/cw/readstory.asp?aid=20031119007

Government plans to distribute computers to 5,000 schools nationwide

"We are trying step by step to eliminate Microsoft," said Nguyen Trung Quynh of Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology. Quynh and other government tech officials want Vietnam to be on the cutting edge of an international movement to embrace open-source software -- products that can be downloaded from the Internet for free and perform the same tasks as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows or Office.

[...]

"We can't totally sweep out Microsoft," Quynh said. "But we hope that new users will start using open source."

Before Vietnamese versions of OpenOffice and Linux were developed, open source was just an abstraction here, said Carrasco-Munoz. "Now you dump this CD on your computer, you install it, you reboot. Bye-bye Microsoft!"

http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/32330.html

Microsoft Loses to Linux in Thailand Struggle

"In the second quarter of 2003, just 40 percent of all desktop PCs shipped in Thailand had a licensed copy of Windows installed, an all-time low that likely will dip even further.

[...]

While some buyers still will install pirated copies of Microsoft's software, Gartner estimates that 70 percent of Thai consumers will stick with Linux, citing freely available software, lower prices and lack of knowledge among first-time PC owners."

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/32110.html

Sewing machine giant Janome adopts OpenOffice.org

"Janome has migrated some of its PCs away from Microsoft Office in favour of the free OpenOffice.org office suite saving the company around $8000 in licence fees, according to IT administrator Scott Langford.

After hearing about OpenOffice.org from a colleague, Langford downloaded version 1.0.2 of the office suite and installed it on 10 of the 30 PCs running Microsoft Windows.

[...]

Although Janome’s Australian operations are small, it has some 60 per cent of the domestic sewing machine market. Internationally, the company has offices in eight countries and more than 3000 employees."

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=281553222&fp=16&fpid=0

Victorian government evaluates OpenOffice.org and StarOffice

Victorian Government spokeswoman Michelle Crawley says the state will "investigate interesting alternatives to Microsoft Office" such as OpenOffice and Sun Microsystems' close cousin, StarOffice.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/24/1069522526315.html

Study: Save up to 25% with open source technologies

According to the German study by Soreon mentioned in the article below, companies can save up to 25% from a TCO perspective if they use open source alternatives.

The Sun Java Desktop System (SJDS) is the winner for larger enterprises, closely followed by non-integrated OpenOffice.org solutions. For medium businesses SJDS and OpenOffice.org both can save about 14% compared to Microsoft technologies. For small businesses it does not really matter, because costs for support and training are higher than the licensing costs.

http://de.internet.com/?id=2025258&section=Marketing-Statistics

http://www.soreon.de/images/titelgrafik_office_software_gross.gif

November 2003

API@OOo Newsletter

"This month the OOo API project started publishing a monthly newsletter which is posted at the 1st of each month to summarize issues from the previous month."

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?msgId=865951&listName=announce

Sun Java Desktop System ISV/Developer Early Adopter Program

ISVs and developers interested in the Sun Java Desktop System should register for the Early Adopter Program at sun.com/partners/javadesktopsystem.

OpenOffice.org Market Share Analysis

"The document includes some data from past OpenOffice.org newsletters and press articles.

If your company is using OpenOffice.org, even if it is a small company, let me/us know! We can include just the number of seats + the industry type, or even mention the name, if we get your permission to do so! The same is true for schools and universities that have deployed OpenOffice.org, StarOffice or another OOo derivative."

http://marketing.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?msgId=894269&listName=dev

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=21674

Denmark urges government support for open source

"However, the report recognised that establishing a existing alternative or a new format would be an uphill battle, given that Microsoft Office cannot read OpenOffice documents or other formats. The Board recommended that Denmark begin a series of trials to test the feasibility of introducing open-source software such as OpenOffice."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39117341,00.htm

International Forwarding Agent Heinz Huber

According to the German article below the international forwarding agent Heinz Huber deployed StarOffice although the logistics company has to exchange documents with about 60 partners.

http://www01.silicon.de/cpo/csh-ts/detail.php?nr=11566&directory=csh-ts

Midsize German firms say ja to Linux

"The potentially lower cost of deploying and maintaining open-source software like Linux and OpenOffice "is clearly what prompted us to seek an alternative to Microsoft," Kloppsteck said. "And I know many other small and medium-size companies in Germany are dropping Microsoft for the same reason.""

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/linux/story/0,10801,86636,00.html

OpenOffice.org 1.1 at Italian Schools

Within the frame of the ' Linux Day 2003 ' event, DIDASCA - The First Italian Cyber School for Lifelong Learning - will deliver for free 12,000 copies of the CDROMs containing the OpenOffice.org 1.1 suite to as many Italian schools.

http://www.progettoemily.it/LinuxDay.htm

Israel slams the door on Microsoft

"The de facto suspension means no upgrades for the duration, at a time when Microsoft is looking to roll out its Office 2003 upgrade; and the Ministry is said to be examining OpenOffice as an alternative."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33365.html

Life Insurance Corporation wants to switch to OpenOffice.org

According to a German article an Indian insurance company is switching, too. Life Insurance Corporation of India will switch to Linux and OpenOffice.org.

The German article can be found at

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-23.10.03-007/

This seems to be related to the following older article

http://www.cmpnetasia.com/ViewArt.cfm?Artid=20998&Catid=8&subcat=79

Vietnam embracing open-source products

"The main open-source tools are Linux -- a free alternative to the Windows operating system -- and OpenOffice, a free alternative to Microsoft Office, with word processing and spreadsheet programs. Two Vietnamese companies have recently developed Vietnamese versions of both, and the country's two biggest computer assemblers are already loading open source onto all their new machines.

``We can't totally sweep out Microsoft,'' Quynh said. ``But we hope that new users will start using open source.''

Before Vietnamese versions of OpenOffice and Linux were developed, open source was just an abstraction here, said Carrasco-Munoz. ``Now you dump this CD on your computer, you install it, you reboot. Bye-bye Microsoft!''"

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/7139304.htm

Australia's history archived in OpenOffice.org

"Australia's history will be viewed digitally in the OpenOffice.org office suite as part of plans to preserve the quality and accessibility of government documents.

[...]

"Open source is really, really important to us because over time it means we can retain data presentation," said Davis.

"Cross platform development is really important, because we can't say you must have a Windows machine to access this file [in the archives]. Who knows what platform most people will be using in 30 years time? So if you have a Linux machine, for example, you should have equal access.""

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=1991153367&fp=2&fpid=1

Sun shines on NSW government desktops

"According to Sun, six NSW government departments are already in the early phases of testing or deploying the software. The departments range in size from 200 up to a "few thousand" staff representing an estimated 30,000 seats, said May.

[...]

Sun's alternative office productivity suite StarOffice -- based heavily on its less-tamed open source cousin OpenOffice -- is a central component in Sun's desktop operating system Java Desktop Suite."

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/os/story/0,2000048630,20280236,00.htm

The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines

"The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to Open Source Software (OSS)-based office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications. They have been developed with guidance from public sector IT experts from Denmark, Finland, Italy, Germany, Malta, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. The relevance and readability of the Migration Guidelines were validated with the help of the regional authorities of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.

These guidelines have been designed to help public administrators decide whether a migration to OSS should be undertaken and describe, in broad technical terms, how such a migration could be carried out. They are based on practical experience of a limited number of publicly available case studies, and cover a wide range of management and technical concerns."

http://www.europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/jsps/index.jsp?fuseAction=showDocument&parent=news&documentID=1647

Download the IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines

http://www.europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/export/files/en/1603.pdf

Download the Comparative Spreadsheet

http://www.europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/export/files/en/1604.xls

Migration Guide by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior

A week ago the European Commission released its Migration Guidelines. Now a Migration Guide has just been released in English by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior. The Guide was originally published in German in July 2003 but is now also available is English.

The report is a very valuable tool for anybody planning to migrate from a Microsoft world to the open world of Open Source and Open Standards incl. OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.

These reports are clear signs of the very strong movement all over Europe toward a new desktop. Use this new report in your efforts to promote open source technologies!

The full report ( pdf, 414 pages!) is available in English here:

http://www.kbst.bund.de/Anlage303777/pdf_datei.pdf

OpenOffice.org XML Essentials

J. David Eisenberg is currently writing a new book about the OpenOffice.org XML file format. A draft of the book is accessible via the link provided below.

http://books.evc-cit.info/

XML Interoperability Test

"Interoperability Test and XML Evaluation of StarOffice Writer 6.0 and Office Word 2003 Beta 2"

http://www.statskontoret.se/pdf/2003116.pdf

http://www.statskontoret.se/english/index.htm

Office 2003/StarOffice Migration Survey - Germany

The popular weekly German computer magazine Computerwoche conducted an online survey in October 2003. Everybody was able to participate and thus the data does not necessarily reflect the reality, but it's still interesting.

The question they asked were:

"Is your company planning to switch to Office 2003/Office System in the foreseeable future?"

[" Wird Ihr Unternehmen in absehbarer Zeit auf Office 2003/ Office System migrieren?"]

We will switch to StarOffice/OOo 55.0 % 552

Yes, we will switch from version 95/97 2.3 % 23

Yes, we will switch from version 2000/XP 11.7 % 117

No 31.0 % 311

-------------

Total 1003

http://www.computerwoche.de/umfrage/ergebnisse.cfm?umfrageid=115

Office 2003/StarOffice Migration Survey – Switzerland

The following data is from a survey on as swiss web page:

Will you update to Office 2003 or StarOffice 7?

Yes, planning update to Office 2003 17 %

Yes, planning update to StarOffice 7 16 %

Waiting for first Office 2003 experiences 9 %

Waiting for first StarOffice 7 experiences 10 %

No update plans 45 %

Don't know 3 %

So far (November 4, 2003) 344 people have participated in the quick poll.

http://www.infoweek.ch/Tools/QuickPoll/qp_result.cfm?QuestionID=155

2004-10-12T22:12:09