LCA Day #1 / OOo MiniConf
Yay, LCA has started. Yesterday was dinner at the (in)famous Woodstock in Canberra. Russell agreed that it was the worst pizza ever… Internet at the accomodation was down, so I got lots of reading done instead.
OpenOffice.org
Today was Day #1 of the OpenOffice.org MiniConf. Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun sort of wrapped around a talk, and not agreeing with him at many stages happened I guess. Silly talk about licensing and software patents, and beating up of the “Even Red Hat recommends Windows for desktops”.
Marc Englaro, from Si2 mentioned challenges faced within organisation. His quick approach to desktop migration:
- Preliminary Business Case – Desktop Usage Survey and user requirements analysis, SOE analysis, Review of current cost structure, TCO analysis, Business case
- Proof of Concept – Design of proposed SOE, development of acceptance tests, workshop-based test of SOE by users, review results
- Pilot – similar to POC, small group of users running in production for fixed period, review results
- Staged rollout
Also good to know the common objections business face with OOo (and not with MSO): Pivot Tables, OOo Calc’s 32,000 row limit, macros requiring conversion, Access databases, Outlook, Visio, Project. Now, in Linux land, we have Evolution to replace Outlook, but neither Dia or OOo Draw comes close to Visio. Planner and MS Project are worlds apart as well. For document revision control tracking, it was mentioned that Xena, from the Australian National Archives would be cool to use, otherwise Propylon has something similar, in a commercial fashion.
Ian Laurenson had a good presentation about OOo Macro Development. His website has some of his macro resources. He heartily recommended the X-Ray Tool. And he’s also starting a OpenOffice.org Extensions Wiki, all really useful resources if you’re into OOo Macro stuff. I ended up buying Andrew Pitonyak’s book on OpenOffice.org Macros.
Ditesh had a great talk on document templating, and how he used the file format (go OASIS XML) and PHP to get things going. And afterward, Ken Foskey talked lots about developing on OpenOffice.org… then it was time for the pub, and Sun was footing the bill :)
“but neither Dia or OOo Draw comes close to Visio” – my personal favourite is kivio, might worth a try
one thing I won’t ever easily swallow: why so many people want to see Access support ? we’ve got so many better ones than access; I learned it, used it, etc. but always found it a toy at most; would never start anything big with it; still, I know that I belong to some wierd minority with this, knowing how many access-driven stuff dwells out there
also, I’d like to say hello, this is my first post here