Si2 has been providing consulting services to enterprise customers investigating or migrating to OpenOffice, StarOffice and Linux for the past 4 years. Customers have included Governments agencies in Canberra, NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, and corporate customers in both Australia and New Zealand, with sizes ranging between 1000 � 6000 users.

The enterprise market is still fairly new in Australia, and while Si2 worked with the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority to go into production with an alternate desktop, most other enterprise clients are still in the investigation and evaluation stages, where Si2 is helping conduct proofs of concepts, pilot projects and TCO analyses.

These projects has allowed Si2 to review the desktop practices of over 20,000 users across Australia and New Zealand, and identify the key challenges facing these typical enterprise uses when they want to migrate to an alternate desktop, and specifically to OpenOffice/StarOffice. This paper will present Si2's experiences about the most common and significant challenges facing an enterprise transitioning to OpenOffice, and the alternative migration strategies available.

OpenOffice.org Writer is a strong competitor to Microsoft Word for both drafts and final layout (desktop publishing) of many technical and academic documents, because it combines some of the best features of Word and FrameMaker. Indeed, Writer does several things better or easier than each of them. This session will cover some of the author�s experiences using OOo Writer�s many features of particular interest to technical writers, including:

• Customizable interface
• Document templates
• Styles
• Advanced page layout capabilities
• Change tracking
• Master documents
• Fields
• Conditional content
• Bibliographic database
• Equation editor
• Macro language
• PDF export
• Microsoft Office compatibility

The University of Southern Queensland has developed a high end XML publishing system known as GOOD (Generic Online/Offline Delivery) for managing the production and delivery of courseware to print, web (via a Learning Management System) and CD-ROM. This system builds on the Distance and e-Learning Centre's decades of experience as a distance education institution.

This paper presents preliminary experiences in customizing OpenOffice.org Writer to serve as an easy-to-use front-end to the GOOD XML publishing system. It also looks at the additional potential for using OpenOffice.org as part of a low-end single source publishing solution for courseware, including export to industry-standard IMS courseware packages.

Document generation and reporting is a fairly common task in business applications. While the common output formats for web based business applications are PDF and HTML, most end-users actually prefer Office document formats due to familiarity and ease of use. This poses a problem for the Free and Open Source Software application developer who lacks cross-platform support for generating these documents. It is close to impossible to generate complicated Office documents without having access to proprietary third party libraries.

With the advent of XML-structured document format popularized with OpenOffice, spreadsheet and word processor document generation becomes a relatively straightforward affair. While OpenOffice has scripting support which facilitates programmatic document generation, this method requires a running OpenOffice process which raises issues of resource consumption as well as scalability. A far more efficient approach for a large number of document generation requirements is to directly manipulate the OpenOffice document's XML representation and insert relevant content.

This presentation will cover the structure of an OpenOffice file, important markup tags, the ease in which the XML representational markup can be manipulated with a particular focus of implementation from the PHP language as well as looking at dynamic templating opportunities that the manipulation affords us.

An introduction on what it takes to get involved in OOo and other alternatives rather than directly working on OOo. Includes machine setup, time, software to simply compile OOo, and some of the traps, for example, how not to come across badly on email lists.

Topics include:

• UDK and API programming to do what you want without getting deeply involved in OOo, and some of the sites available to help.
• ooo.ximian.com and accepting patches through there, and adding your blog to the planet at ooo.ximian.com to show an active community.
• Documentation for the OOo developer: What is out there and where does it lack. Who is going to fix any limitations.
• Talk about going to Germany and meeting the developers, including cultural style and how not to take offence at German directness.
• OOo for the hardcore developer including a small presentation about how OOo code base is structured and how the various projects (http://projects.openoffice.org/accepted.html of OOo are broken down. Discuss what you CANNOT do with OOo. Where you must be prepared to put in the time as there are 12,000,000 lines of code you can't possibly grasp all this and expect to change it.
• How do you succeed in OOo development?