Marketing PlanetDownloads
Recorded downloads of OpenOffice.org via the Bouncer since the launch of Version 3.1. For more stats, see this page. ContributorsAlan Lord (feed)Benjamin Horst (feed) Charles Schulz (feed) Christian Driga (feed) GullFOSS (feed) Italo Vignoli (feed) John McCreesh (feed) Leif Lodahl (feed) Louis Suarez-Potts (feed) OOo Marketeers (feed) Feeds  
Bloggings on marketing topics by project members - see disclaimer. November 06, 2009John McCreesh : ‘Cento Milioni’ Conference – day 3
A chat with Olivier about what we can learn from Brazil, home now to three ‘Cento Milioni’ corporate desktop deployments, then a quick sesson with Italo to decide how we will close the OOoCon, and just time to knock together a few slides in Impress. Back to the Conference, where the Marketing Project had grabbed a vacant conference slot to continue the discussions about plans for next year. These discussions need to be continued on the mailing lists with colleagues who couldn’t attend the Cento Milioni Conference, so we can get budget proposals in front of the Community Council for next year. Looks like I have some transcription to do when I get home. First proper lunch of the OOoCon (i.e. > pizza) then back to join in a Community Council Q&A sesssion. This was not as lively as in some past Conferences, but it was interesting that several of the issues raised today, had also been raised by the candidates for the vacant seats in our conversation on Thursday evening. Then on to the stage to bring the Conference to a close with the expected lively contribution from Italo. Italo handed the “poor man’s torch” to Peter for next year’s OOoCon in Budapest – I’ll try and link to photos of this on the web… And that was it. The three days of conference have flown by, and our amazing interntional community becomes virtual for another ten months. Mille Grazie Orvieto! by John at November 06, 2009 08:41 PM CET John McCreesh : ‘Cento Milioni’ Conference – day 2
Another full day at the OpenOffice.org ‘Cento Milioni’ Conference , from 9am to 7pm followed by the famous Native Language Confederation (NLC) Party – tickets a very non-threatening 10 Euro. The NLC is arguably OpenOffice.org’s greatest success, with mostly volunteer teams around the world translating the software and documentation nd providing the full range of support in the world’s major languages. I spent the morning listening to the documentation and translation teams sharing success stories and best practice, and grumbling about software support for their activities. There’s a clear opportunity for some open-source developers to fill gaps here … and earn the gratitude of hundreds of people around the world! The afternoon was spent hopping between tracks. One major conference theme has been User Experience (UX) work. The OpenOffice.org Renaissance team had provoked a storm in the blogosphere earlier in the year. I enjoyed watching the team trying to cajole an OOoCon audience into a participative session showing how UX goes about it business. It was interesting to compare this with the work IBM have done on Lotus Symphony, their commercial product derived from OpenOffice.org. It was also great to hear from the hugely successful NLC operation in Brazil, where OpenOffice.org (or BrOffice,org as it’s known for trademark reasons) is in danger of becoming the de-facto choice, with three major corporate deployments each with ‘cnto milioni’ desktop deployments. So it was only right to round off the day at the NLC Party, which was a hugely convivial event. Alas, the caterers had failed to estimate the appetites of software developers – or the necessity for strict portion control at buffets attended by said population by John at November 06, 2009 07:57 AM CET November 05, 2009John McCreesh : ‘Cento Milioni’ Conference – day 1
Another ten hour day – even the lunch hour was taken up by a follow-up Community Council meeting – so I won’t attempt a summary of every session. The Conference Programme is on the web, as are the recordings of the conference sessions. My main impression at the end of the first day is the way that OpenOffice.org is becoming mainstream. We had presentations from municipal authorities who have adopted OpenOffice.org wholescale; from a systems integrator who building OpenOffice.org into solutions; even a hardware company launching a multi-button mouse specifically designed for OpenOffice.org. Presenters addressed the kind of issues that only arise in large scale deployments: migration, training, tailoring OpenOffice.org / locking down the software for mass desktop rollouts. Presenters talked about running OpenOffice.org on netbooks and creating portable versions to run from a usb stick – OpenOffice is now a truly pervasive application. To end the day: another civic reception with drinks and a buffet, this time featuring local wines, meats, pastas, cheeses, etc. These people take their food seriously. A quick conversation with some senior Oracle folks – I hope they were impressed with the astonishing value for money which the OpenOffice.org Community represents I now need to add today’s photos to my OOoCon album in Facebook… by John at November 05, 2009 08:18 AM CET November 04, 2009John McCreesh : Watch OOoCon!
Stop Press
by John at November 04, 2009 11:48 AM CET John McCreesh : ‘Cento Milioni’ Conference – day-1
My day began at 10am, with a workshop led by Italo Vignoli, a PR professional who has worked wonders in driving up the brand recognition and market share of OpenOffice.org in Italy. Italo’s session was a masterclass in how open source communities with zero marketing budget can compete and win against companies with six figure annual budgets – by doing what they do best. After a quick pizza, back for a meeting of the MarCons (Marketing Contacts) again to learn from the successful Italian operation, and discuss how 2009 had gone. It was our “Year of the developer”, and we had focussed spending on going to developer conferences. We had feedback from those who had taken part – what hadn’t worked, what had, and what we should do more of. Looking to next year, we had some good discussions on priorities and budget requests – but we decided to continue this in a full conference session to canvass wider views. The Community Council then kicked in at about 5pm – we manage to be even later when meeting face to face than we are on irc Just time to upload some photos to Facebook, and the end of a long day. Ten hours of meetings, and that was just the pre-conference day! by John at November 04, 2009 07:24 AM CET November 01, 2009OOo Marketeers : Follow OpenOffice.org Conference on Twitter!
At http://twitter.com/ooocon we've just set up a Twitter bot for the OpenOffice.org Conference. It checks Twitter every five minutes for posts with the tag #ooocon and retweets them automatically.  by floeff (noreply@blogger.com) at November 01, 2009 09:54 PM CET GullFOSS : New: OOo-DEV 3.2.0 Developer Snapshot (build OOO320_m3) available
Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev OOO320_m3 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2.0 has been uploaded. If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker. Please use the following link: Release Notes: MD5 checksums: by Joost Andrae at November 01, 2009 01:07 PM CET October 29, 2009GullFOSS : October Status Update for Project Renaissance
Thinning out process for the existing OOo user interface has started. Focus for OOo 3.3 will be on Impress. Please find the October status update presentation for Project Renaissance at the OOo Wiki (1 MB). Feedback welcome. Best regards, Project Renaissance Teamby frankl at October 29, 2009 04:20 PM CET Leif Lodahl : 100,000,000 downloadsOn October 28th. 2009, the one hundred millionth person clicked on the Download OpenOffice.org button since version 3.0 of the software was announced just over one year ago.www.openoffice.org by Leif Lodahl (noreply@blogger.com) at October 29, 2009 12:49 PM CET October 28, 2009John McCreesh : OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2010
An interesting piece of research came my way today courtesy of Computer Weekly magazine. They asked their tame panel questions about open-source versus commercial software, and published their findings here. The section of interest to OpenOffice.org enthusiasts states:
This provides evidence to support our belief that in large organisations, software purchasing decision makers are pretty conservative – “no-one gets fired for buying Microsoft”. In smaller organisations, decision makers are more willing to do their own research, and having tried OpenOffice.org, are more likely to go for it. They are probably also more careful with their budgets! by John at October 28, 2009 08:38 PM CET John McCreesh : Oracle and OpenOffice.org
It was also good today to see a report on Oracle’s plans for OpenOffice.org. Sun Microsystems is OpenOffice.org’s founding and principle sponsor, so the news that Sun was to be acquired by Oracle had set hearts fluttering in the open-source world. It’s worth quoting the relevant section in full:
Which sounds remarkably similar to the Sun proposition, with OpenOffice.org (shame about the .org) as the free version and StarOffice as a commercial offering. Another reason to be cheerful in the run up to OOoCon 2009 – the Cento Milioni Conference. by John at October 28, 2009 08:23 PM CET John McCreesh : Cento Milioni Celebrations
by John at October 28, 2009 08:19 PM CET GullFOSS : OOo QA Reloaded: Internship program - Individual project
a follow up to blog: OOo QA Internship programm I am proud to introduce the results from the three month individual project of the Hitek school students, which is an important and closing part inside the oo qa internship program: Sample Music Database p.s. a lot of further info & stuff you get on the students sites
screenshots from a students sample database:
.. at the end i would like to quote Nadejda, a student from the project: bye Chris by clu at October 28, 2009 04:07 PM CET GullFOSS : New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300_m63) available
Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m63 which still installs as OOo-DEV 3.2 has been uploaded to the mirror network. If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker. Please use the following link: Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m62" directory: Release Notes: MD5 checksums: by Joost Andrae at October 28, 2009 11:48 AM CET October 27, 2009Charles Schulz : Running for Lang Representative at the Community Council
I thought it might help if I’d post here my “official” information page for the OpenOffice.org Community Council Elections. This page can be found on the OpenOffice.org wiki. A few words on Charles-H. Schulz My name is Charles-H. Schulz and I have been a contributor to the OpenOffice.org project since its 1.0 release. I live in Paris and have been working in several IT-related jobs. Today I run a small consultancy in the fields of Free Software and Open Standards. I’m not really what you will call a technical person, but at least I know how to use a terminal and, among other things, start OpenOffice.org from there. In fact, I even know how to start it as a server in “headless” mode, more accurately. By the way, I’m running a Fedora 11 on a quad core HP computer as my main machine, a two years-old Mac Book Pro you might see me with if you go to Orvieto, and as of very recently a Samsung with Android on it. My other areas of interest include litterature, History, philosophy and organic food, among other things. So why am I writing all this? Because we are in the process of electing some of the future members of the OpenOffice.org, and I’m running as a candidate in the Native-Language category. The rules of renewal of Council members are a bit complex, but there are different types of possible candidates that may run, and I’m running in one of them this year. It is the first time I’m running for the Council. What does Charles do inside OpenOffice.org?I’m doing several things inside OpenOffice.org . I have somewhat of a strange title “Lead of the Native-Language Confederation”. It sounds like it belongs to Battlestar Galactica, but it actually is a very OpenOfficeish thing. What this means is I’m in charge of organizing and helping new and existing communities of OpenOffice.org developers, users, marketers, documentation writers who speak in their own native-language. These communities are called native-language projects. They work with the entire project and are one of the key factors of our success. When I took on that role, they were about 5 of them. Now, they’re around 100. Serving as a volunteer in that position makes one both a player and a witness of how the OpenOffice.org community works. On the one hand I have a social and administrative task, on the other, one should not stop there: you have to look for more volunteers who may start new projects. That’s a fascinating job. I have also done other things inside our community. I was among the founders of the Business Development project (aka bizdev) and I am also very proud to be a co-lead of the ODF@WWW project. It is an incubator project that fiddles with ODF documents online, and allows them to be edited real time on a wiki and inside OpenOffice.org. In fact, this project is very important for the future of OpenOffice.org, and for our final goal, which is world domination. What would Charles do in the Community Council?That’s a good question, isn’t it? My first duty, as a “Lang” representative, would be to represent the worldwide communities of OpenOffice.org. I’m not going to make promises like a politician, because this is not a campaign: it’s an information page. So I’m just going to explain what I think I could do there and how I could help. So my first duty would be to express the point of views of these worldwide communities to the Council, which means explaining their issues, their needs and wants. I will also have to work with the other Lang representative (because there’s two of us at the Council) and help the Council run our project. I should also try to get a bigger perspective on things, because OpenOffice.org is not just the addition of all the interests of categories, people and organizations that make up the project. It’s something bigger, more beautiful and more powerful. We are on a mission, and our mission is twofold: make OpenOffice.org one of the best Free Software for the future, and have fun. Because if you don’t have fun, well, you won’t even finish reading what I’m writing. More seriously: The future might be tough. But it’s going to be exciting, and in the end, I think we’re going to have a pretty awesome project, a project with a strong basis and foundation, that will genuinely be a great place for its people and its supporters. At least that’s what I will also try to help with at the Community Council, and I will consider myself satisfied if I remain true to these objectives and to the value of software freedom and true openness. by Charles at October 27, 2009 05:29 PM CET October 25, 2009Leif Lodahl : November 2009 NewsletterNewsletter November (Danish) is out: http://bit.ly/3H4Txw. Read about 100 mio. downloads and a nine year old girl. There is also something about OpenOffice. by Leif Lodahl (noreply@blogger.com) at October 25, 2009 08:07 PM CET October 23, 2009GullFOSS : User Feedback Data for Impress
Project Renaissance has created a special spreadsheet with the Impress User Feedback Data. This spreadsheet is easier to use than the full version (no filtering needed) and will be used for the thinning out process of the Impress user interface. The spreadsheet provides data for:
Best regards, The Renaissance Team by frankl at October 23, 2009 01:02 PM CET October 22, 2009Alan Lord : Our Windows 7 Special Offer
This post is a “reprint” of an email we have just sent to the subscriber list for our Liberation newsletter. The audience is largely UK based businesses and public sector organisations. Should you wish to receive Liberation, you can subscribe here and please feel free to pass it on. Today, Microsoft invite you to part with your hard-earned cash and upgrade your computers to Windows 7®. If you are one of the majority still using Windows XP, then moving to Windows 7 may not be a pleasant or inexpensive task… Surprisingly there isn’t actually a way to upgrade your computer from Windows XP to Windows 7 in the traditional sense. You’ll need to back up all your data, re-format the hard-drive and start again from scratch. Windows doesn’t store your documents, personal information, historical data, emails, passwords, cookies, preferences, settings etc. in one place. So backing up and rebuilding Windows computers is a very time-consuming and complicated process:
Plan for this process taking anywhere between 4 and 8 hours for each and every computer you have. Gartner estimates that real migration costs will be between $1,035 & $1,930 per user from Windows XP to Windows 7. Why can’t I upgrade? Windows 7 Upgrades That is a good question, and one that we have not seen a good answer to. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal asked Microsoft about upgrade paths and was sent this matrix showing all the different ways you can’t upgrade from other versions of Windows to Windows 7 (Blue = No upgrade, rip out and replace. Green = in-place upgrade). Microsoft have also provided a document explaining the same thing in words. There is no upgrade path from any of the following operating systems:
That’s a complete mess. What can I do then?You could do nothing and stay on Windows XP for as long as possible. Although we think this will be a very popular choice, staying on a nearly 10 year old OS probably isn’t the best policy for a forward thinking organisation. You do have a choice
As you are going to have to rip out and replace your computers’ operating systems anyway, now is a real Carpe Diem opportunity to investigate an alternative (or two) whilst considering your options. The Open Learning Centre recommends that your organisation investigates the many benefits offered by a modern Linux-based desktop operating system such as Ubuntu. As an authorised Ubuntu partner we can help your organisation with evaluation, installation, testing, migration, implementation, training and support services.  Ubuntu Desktop Ubuntu is a modern, stable, reliable and secure computing platform that includes most of the applications we all use every day, such as a compatible office suite (Word-processing, Spreadsheets, Presentations) OpenOffice.org, email and calendaring, web browsing and image manipulation tools. Best of all, Ubuntu is free:
The retail price for a single Windows 7 Professional license is £219.99 and it’s £229.99 for the Ultimate version. This doesn’t include applications either. Our Offer: On-Site Ubuntu Installation and TrainingThe Open Learning Centre will visit your premises, install Ubuntu on a suitable computer, and provide approximately 2-3 hours (i.e approx half a working day) of professional training and advice on Ubuntu for £229.991 (inc. VAT). An outline of the training is available on our website. Please contact us to book your Introduction to Ubuntu. Open your mind to Open Source software today1. Depending on your location we may need to charge extra for travelling expenses etc. Tell Someone Else!
         by Alan Lord at October 22, 2009 05:00 AM CET October 21, 2009GullFOSS : New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300_m62) available
Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m62 which still installs as OOo-DEV 3.2 has been uploaded to the mirror network. If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker. Please use the following link: Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m62" directory: Release Notes: MD5 checksums: by Joost Andrae at October 21, 2009 07:56 AM CET October 18, 2009OOo Marketeers : Beta Release of OpenOffice.org 3.2Have a look at the features and enhancements of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.2 release with our beta version. The final release is expected for December.  by floeff (noreply@blogger.com) at October 18, 2009 02:25 PM CEST Disclaimer: all views expressed on this page are those of the individual contributors, and may not reflect the views of the OpenOffice.org Community. If you find any offensive or objectionable material, please notify the Marketing Project Leads. |
Another wet morning in Orvieto. My conference day started with the Art Project’s proposals for a new logo for OpenOffice.org. These are the results of just a few weeks’ visual brainstorming, and showed a wide range of ideas from the evolutionary to the revolutionary. I must say I’m not a fan of real-life seagulls – rats with wings…
leading to long queues and people threatening to ring Dominos for additional pizzas. Maybe this is the ’slow food’ for which Umbria is famous 
The minutes of this will be posted on the wiki, so I’m not going to duplicate them here (especially as I will be writing them…) We finally called it a day at 8pm, and went off to enjoy drinks and nibbles courtesy of the local suthorities here, grateful for the out-of-season conference business.
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