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The Free and Open Productivity Suite
Released: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15

Abstracts of Conference Papers - Keynote

Should I adopt OpenOffice.org?

Prof.Giancarlo Succi Free University of Bozen - Bolzano. Cospa Project
Often, a rather theological discussion is made on whether the OpenOffice.org Suite can be an effective substitute of the Microsoft Office Suite. While clearly no license fees are required to use OpenOffice.org, claims are made that there are other, more insidious costs to consider, rather than the simple license cost. The discussion is kept at a very high level of abstraction, complex enough to scare /regular/ users to think at migrations in either way. In the opinion of the speaker, the problem is not always straightforward and there is not a single, Boolean answer that applies in any context. However, it is possible to lay down a handful factors to consider in evaluating the costs of the migration and to use them as a guide in making informed decisions. Such factors define the comprehensive cost in adopting a tool, often called with the esoteric term "TCO" or Total Cost of Ownership. In the talk a manageable structure for the TCO of Office/OpenOffice.org is presented and sample case studies are discussed.
Biography: Giancarlo Succi is Professor with Tenure at the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, where he directs the Center for Applied Software Engineering. Before joining the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, he has been Professor with Tenure at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, Alberta, and Assistant Professor at the University of Trento, Italy. He was also chairman of a small software company, EuTec. The research interest of Giancarlo Succi involve multiple areas of software engineering, including
  1. open source development - empirical studies of the evolution of open source projects, analysis of the structure of the market in presence of monopolies and open source products, tools supporting open source and agile methodologies;
  2. agile methodologies, with specific interest to the relationships of methodologies and practices, determining the scope of the application of the different agile methodologies;
  3. experimental software engineering, - measuring the effectiveness of so called "software best practices" using software metrics, standard statistical techniques, statistical meta-analysis and neural networks, with special attention to quality, reliability, and customer satisfaction;
  4. software engineering over the Internet - development of means to implement tools on demands (tools that can be downloaded from the Internet, rented on a "per-use" basis), distributed repositories of reusable software components, system for co-ordinating, managing, and accounting the work of distributed teams, web services and software engineering;
  5. software product lines and software reuse - when and how to establish a software product line and to use domain analysis and engineering to make the software product line cost effective, integrating a reuse policy inside a software development process under the perspectives of programming paradigm, process maturity, productivity, quality, legal issues, ...
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E-education on the national level

Bernard Herman, uni. dipl. ing.
We will be speaking about legal, economical and technological aspects and the vision of e-education on the national level in Slovenia. We will stress the idea of an efficient production of didactic materials, training teachers and using free and open-source software in education. We will also talk about the necessity of establishing a center for knowledge exchange and user support, setting up reference schools in regions, preparing didactic materials on the basis of open-source aplications and a de-centralized aspect of integrating IT into school system. We will mention the activities of the OKO group, which started the plan to introduce free and open-source software into national educational system in 2003. We will finish off with an open discussion and an invitation for further involvement from the participants.
Biography: Bernard Herman, electrical engineer was born 1952 in Celje. In 1977 he completed his degree at the Faculty of electrical engineering in Ljubljana, where he studied automatics. After his diploma he took a post at Iskra Automatika, where he worked in software and hardware development for computer control devices for control and supervision industrial processes. In 1985 he took over the management of a project for the development of industrial computer systems for control machines, robots and technological processes. Together with his colleagues, he received a national award for inventions and improvements.
In the next few years, he worked as an adviser on industrial automatisation and informatisation. In 1997 he started his work in the Slovenian goverment, at the Ministry of Finance, where he worked on informatics, mostly in the area of establishing local and international communication networks.
In 2001 he started working for the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, where he was the lead of the information infrastructure department. He continued his work in the area of IT in educational establishments. In 2003 he started a project of introducing open-source and free software into educational establishments and continued to work on IT in 2005, when he was appointed as the lead of a workgroup to prepare and analyze a report on the options of internet access for school textbooks. He is currently involved in research activities about the possibilities of collaboration between education establishments, business subjects, public administration and society in the area of using free and open-source solutions.
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