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Released: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15

Abstracts of Conference Papers - Friday

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OpenOffice.org on three continents A Real Life Case Study
Michael Bona Vorstand/CIO skilldeal AG, Gitschiner Strasse 94, 10969 Berlin, Germany
The case study presents reasons for, obstacles and experiences of a migration from MS Office to OpenOffice.org in the context of a small but very international company.
The Case Study is based on a real project and shows how OpenOffice.org (OOo) helped a small company gain a competitive cost advantage over much larger competitors and helped the IT infrastructure keep up with the rapid growth of the company. It is also a demonstration of the potential benefits and risks of a migration. The case study is divided into four parts:
  1. Before migration: "Migration Corp." is a small but very international company. The roughly 20 employees work in six offices on three continents and have five working languages in everyday business. In an industry dominated by three global giants, "Migration Corp." manages rapid growth thanks to innovative products and rigid cost control. In support of this strategy the complete IT has been outsourced. The outsourcing service company is asked to come up with solutions to provide a reliable IT-infrastructure at very low cost. An audit of the existing IT shows that a significant part of IT costs is spent on licenses. At the same time, management has trouble tracking all licenses due to dispersed organisation and rapid growth. As one measure, the outsourcing service company suggests migration to OpenOffice.org on clients. The Case Study shows a number of interesting and not widely discussed reasons why the management was initially sceptical but eventually agreed.
  2. Migration: OpenOffice.org is rolled out in several stages together with a company-wide standard desktop installation. Install glitches for multi-user installations and the complexity of adding dictionaries are two examples for the challenges of the standard install which are eventually overcome. All in all, the process is fairly smooth. The Case Study shows the problems of the roll-out and how they were solved.
  3. After migration: Seven months after migration, the result is largely positive. Most users are happy with OOo even though not all have received training. Calls for end user support have gone done quite quickly and most problems in exchanging documents have been resolved. The Case Study shows what issues remain and presents a number of suggestions for a smooth migration.
  4. Conclusion and Outlook: "Migration Corp." is now a convinced OOo convert. OOo has become a cornerstone of the IT infrastructure and will be employed in a number of new and unexpected ways. In the planning stages are plug-ins for custom financial functions and using a database for file storage, indexing and archiving. To make this happen, "Migration Corp." hopes for an effective and mutually beneficial dialogue with fellow users and the development community.
Biography: Michael Bona is CIO at skilldeal AG, a Berlin based IT-Consulting and Outsourcing company. He holds a management degree from ESCP-EAP - The European School of Management. Bona has worked on IT projects in several European countries before co-founding skilldeal AG in 2000. The focus of his work are innovative and cost-optimised solutions for small and medium companies - often resulting in projects based on Free or Open Source Software.

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User Experience (Panel)
Lutz Höger Product Manager, User Experience Christian Jansen Product Specialist, User Experience Matthias Müller-Prove Product Manager, User Experience Sun Microsystems / Star Office Software Entwicklungs GmbH, Sachsenfeld 4, 20097 Hamburg, Germany, Nick Richards
This panel will concentrate on usability issues of OpenOffice.org. It will tackle the general conception that open-source software and usable software exclude each other. A team of professional usability experts, together with user interface contributors of the OpenOffice.org community can create an Office product that holds its own in the face of Office suite competition.
Biography: Lutz Höger (TBD); Christian Jansen has held a position on the StarOffice User Experience team for over 4 years. As a member of this user experience team at Sun Microsystems, he plays a major role in the product design of StarOffice. His responsibilities include designing and specifying the graphical user interface and the functionalitly behind it and in so doing, addressing easy-to-use-interface needs. Specific areas include color schemes and accessibility considerations. He holds a degree in Communication Design from the 'Hamburger Akademie für Kommunikationsdesign und Art Direction' (Hamburg Academy for Communication Design and Art Direction); Matthias Müller-Prove is a creative computer scientist. His reputation as a first-class human-computer interaction expert is based on nine years of direct experience designing professional software interfaces for international operating companies. Before joining the StarOffice User Experience team at Sun Microsystems, he played a significant role in designing the user interface of Adobe GoLive. He holds a degree from University of Hamburg (Dipl.-Inform.) and is member of the usability professionals association upa and ACM/SIGCHI; Nick Richards is the Marketing Project Lead at OpenOffice.org. This means he gets in the way of programmers, asks lots of questions and talks too much. He is in the final year of a History degree at King's College London.

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The Open ECDL: how to use opensource software - namely OpenOffice.org – for delivering ECDL courses
Egidio Pentiraro Advisor, EdOsNet.org, Via Ragazzi del 99 n. 19, I - 23100 Sondrio SO, Italy
ECDL stands for "European Computer Driving Licence". ECDL is an internationally recognised qualification that enables people to certify their competence in essential computer skills & knowledge. In the past, the ECDL was mainly based on Microsoft products: Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Outlook.
Recently, the ECDL has become a really ' vendor independent certification '. Now, the ECDL Tests can be performed everywhere with opensource software, such as: GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Evolution.
Biography:

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