Skip to content

You are not logged in. Register orLog In

start:

Abstracts of Conference Papers - General Stream

OpenOffice.org in Vienna's City Administration

Ing. Brigitte Lutz & Ing. Patrick Amcha - City of Vienna / Municipal Department 14 - Automated Data Processing, Information and Communications Technology
OpenOffice.org will be installed on 18.000 PC-Workstations of Vienna's City Administration.
  • Presentation of the roll-out plan
  • How to guarantee the high-quality standard of the software environment
  • Internal Supporting Measures for the introduction of the new product
Target audience: Project managers, IT Managers, governmental administration
Biographies:
Brigitte Lutz is engineer for organization and project management and responsible for the introduction of Open Source Software on the PC Workstations of Vienna's City Administration

Patrick Amcha is engineer for electronic systems and responsible for the product management of OpenOffice.org in the Municipal Department for IT
Back

What is new in OpenOffice.org 2.0 and StarOffice 8?

Erwin Tenhumberg - Product Marketing Manager, Sun Microsystems
The presentation will mostly be a live demo of all the new features in OpenOffice.org 2.0 and StarOffice 8. The talk will given an overview about what the new version of the office suite is capable of. Among the features to be shown are:
  • The new database front end (OpenOffice.org Base)
  • The improved PDF export
  • The extended PivotTable support
  • The new multi-pane view in Impress
  • The improved support for animation effects and slide transitions
  • The new format paintbrush and the enhance word count feature
  • The XForms support
  • The digital signature feature
  • The new mail merge wizard
  • Management and migration tools
Target audience: OpenOffice.org Users
Biography: Erwin Tenhumberg is the Product Marketing Manager for OpenOffice.org within the Client Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. Erwin started working for Sun as a Systems Engineer doing pre-sales for various software and desktop products including the StarOffice office suite and the Sun Ray ultra-thin client. Before Erwin joined Sun he worked for various companies doing Java consulting, software development, desktop application administration, and end user support.
Back

Commercial Solutions based on OpenOffice.org

Erwin Tenhumberg - Product Marketing Manager, Sun Microsystems
This session will give an overview about solutions based on OpenOffice.org. Topics that will be covered are:
  • OpenOffice.org market situation
  • OpenOffice.org deployments
  • OpenOffice.org derivatives
  • Linux distributions
  • Third party ISV integrations
  • Available add-ons
  • Support and services
  • Migration tools
The goal of this session is to show that OpenOffice.org is more than just an open source office suite.

Target audience: OpenOffice.org Users and Developers
Biography: Erwin Tenhumberg is the Product Marketing Manager for OpenOffice.org within the Client Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. Erwin started working for Sun as a Systems Engineer doing pre-sales for various software and desktop products including the StarOffice office suite and the Sun Ray ultra-thin client. Before Erwin joined Sun he worked for various companies doing Java consulting, software development, desktop application administration, and end user support.
Back

Organizational and psychological determinants of OpenOffice.org suite adoption

Salvatore Zappalà - Professor, Università di Bologna - Facoltà di Psicologia
Maurizio Berti - Yacme Srl - Bologna
The adoption of new technologies is a process related to economical and technical reasons as well as organizational and psycho-social factors.
At the end of 2004, Ospedali Galliera of Genova (a large hospital, over 600 pc's and 1200 employees) decided to turn to Open Formats by replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org. The migration is still in progress and is expected to get to completion within July 2005.  The process needed proper migration planning,  targeted communication (which was given remarkable importance so that everybody could share the reasons of that change), employees' training and post-migration support.
In this scenario, organizational and individual variables, developed in the organizational psychology field, were measured through questionnaires, as it was expected that more positive attitudes towards OpenOffice.org could influence its acceptance and adoption.

The dependent variables of the research were:
  • attitudes, usefulness and easiness of new software
  • acceptance and sharing of organizational change
Main predictors of the attitudes, measured through the questionnaire, were:
  • “Organizational climate for innovation”
  • organizational and group support,
  • the individual sense of being able to manage one’s own problems (“general self-efficacy”) and problems with computers (“computers self-efficacy”).
On-line and paper questionnaires were submitted to the employees who attended the training sessions. Data collection is still in progress.
 
During the presentation:
  1. the complete design of the migration plan and the research
  2. the preliminary results, that show organizational and individual variables supporting or slowing down the acceptance and adoption of OpenOffice.org.
Target audience: Public Administration and and Enterprise
Biographies: Salvatore Zappalà, professor in the Faculty of Psychology of  Bologna University, focuses on “Psychology of work and organizations”. He currently teaches “Psychology of  economical behaviour” in the“Psychology of organizations and services” graduation program.
Maurizio Berti has been a partner of Yacme company of Bologna since September 2000.
He's the supervisor of Yacme's OpenOffice.org division and is mainly involved in migration process management and training.
Back

Cambodia: Re-computerization of the Country based on localized OpenOffice.org 2.0

Javier Solá - Coordinator – Khmer Software Initiative, Open Forum of Cambodia NGO
The Cambodian Government’s Master Plan for the Deployment of FOSS, whose center-piece is Khmer language OpenOffice 2.0, plans full migration of Government offices within the next year. All government teacher training centers will only teach OpenOffice, following the training materials and the certification program developed by the Open Forum of Cambodia NGO.
Fully translated and operational versions of OOo 2.0 (including help) are already being used for training of trainers in the training center of NiDA (National Information Communications Technology Development Authority), producing 30 new prepared teachers every week. For this program, Open Forum has already developed 45 hours worth of OOo 2.0 training materials (including teacher instructions), student handouts, exercises, evaluation materials and 20 hours of training-for-trainers materials. All this is supported by a certification program that will help standardization of computer education in the country
The strength of the program is based on the fact that there are no proprietary computer tools translated to Khmer language, turning users into demanders of local-language software, and showing that language is strongest added value to FOSS adoption.
The strategy is to distribute first OpenOffice (and other localized FOSS applications) on Windows, in order to enlist the support of computer vendors and the training industry (not trying to make them change to Linux immediately), and then change to KDE on Windows and then on Linux, a small change for users that will already be spending 95% of their computer work time working on FOSS Khmer language applications.
Thanks to OpenOffice 2.0 Cambodia is on the way of becoming the first country in the world in which s FOSS productivity suite will be more used than proprietary software.

Target audience: Marketing - localisers
Biography: Javier Solá is the coordinator of the Khmer OS Initiative, a NGO-based project aimed at producing free software in Khmer language. He is also directing a project to develop an "Open Source Localization Toolkit" addressed to small economies that wish to start localization projects. He participates in some specific Open Source projects that attempt to facilitate localization processes. His interest on Open Source derives from the believe that it can be used to reduce the digital divide through localization. He is interested on finding working strategies for wide distribution of Open Source software in poor countries. He is the author of the localization documentation for OpenOffice 2.0
Back

Introduction to OpenOffice.org macro development

Ian Craig Laurenson
An overview of OpenOffice.org's underlying object model, using xray.xray to find the properties and methods of objects and how to interpret the documentation in the Development Guide for writing macros in BASIC. Some suggested conventions in coding and distributing the code. Brief look at coding in other languages such as Python. Some code snippets, and some of Iannz macros that solve particular problems. Finishing with participants' problem solving session.

Target audience: Competent OpenOffice.org users who would like to be extend their skill set into writing macros for OpenOffice.org.
Biography: Ian is part of the OpenOffice.org community, currently writing macros and documentation. In the past, amongst other things, he has been in charge of computing at two tertiary technical institutes and lectured on several short-term contracts at a university in New Zealand, and been computer manager of a research organisation for a number of years.
Back

Imagining An OpenOffice.org Foundation

Louis Suarez-Potts - Community Manager, OpenOffice.org/CollabNet
This talk examines the pros and cons of an OpenOffice.org Foundation. That is, one that would hold not just funds for marketing and development but the source's IP.  There has long been discussion on the issue, but for various usually good reasons little action, unless strategic inaction counts.  I briefly discuss the history of that inaction, the various calls for a foundation and their usually tacit rebutalls.  I then examine the current situation and how an OpenOffice.org might look and work, what model it should follow and how it should be set up.
Biography: Louis Suarez-Potts has been the community manager of OpenOffice.org since close to its beginning.  He is also the chari of the Community Council and the lead of several projects on OpenOffice.org. He lives in Toronto.
Back