Abstracts of Conference Papers - Friday

StarOffice migration within the scope of TCO and ROI

Frank Sieber Senior Consultant, .riess integration ag, Draisstr. 10, D-76307 Karlsbad-Langensteinbach, Germany

The spirit of OpenSource together with the features of a high professional office software package has tremendously increased the interest in StarOffice or OpenOffice.org for a huge amount of companies all over the world. For the first time there is a real alternative office software available on the market, compatibly running on all common operating systems.
For most companies the introduction of StarOffice means an opportunity and a challenge at the same time. On the one hand there is the tempting offer of an advantageous license model, on the other hand one should consider the investment in time and efforts migration brings about.
Therefore, the first step should be an migration study, concerning the Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment (TCO+ROI) for such a mission.
This presentation focuses on the key issues of an appropriate TCO and ROI analysis for a successful StarOffice migration project.
The practical experiences of .riess as Sun's first StarOffice Migration Partner in Germany offers precious guidance in your considerations in introducing StarOffice.

Biography: After his diploma in physics Frank started his career at .riess as a systemengineer in 1996. Today, his main activities consists in concept development, planning and implementing business continuity solutions in computing center environments.

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Smooth Desktop Migration to Linux and OpenOffice.org

Diplom-Oekonom Bernd Kretschmer freier Journalist (written together with Jay S. Hill)

Those attempting to implement open source software solutions in the current software environment find themselves with daunting obstacles. The Microsoft muscle influences governments around the world through its lobbying power. Microsoft's massive advertising campaigns tell people that Microsoft is a soft and fuzzy butterfly, and is innovative in its development of software. The facts are that they are a brutal monopolistic business, and have never created anything close to a visionary product.
In spite of the problems in dealing with Micorosoft, there are slow and timid adopters in organizations who, although they are aware of the problems with Microsoft, are not irritated enough to leave their dank Microsoft cafeteria and have a bite from the smorgasborge of the alternatives, however savory those alternatives might be.
What makes organizations and people timid in migrating to Linux desktops?
Fear of losing functionality, fear of not being able to work as easily with others as they currently do, fear of spending money and time learning new software, fear of losing their existing work because they can't use it with the new tools, and fears of being hamstrung in different ways than they have by Microsoft.
Smooth migration paths:
Windows applications in Linux environments:

MS Win2K Terminal Services, Citrix Metaframe, Tarantella
Codeweaver, VMWare, Win4lin, Wine, ...
MS Office, Lotus client, etc. on top,

Open Source applications in Windows environments:

OpenOffice.org for Windows
more Open Source apps

Benefits:

Use of legacy applications in new environments, vs. similar applications in the old environment
Easy to back out of an application at no risk,
Can go ahead with proprietary file formats without risks of Microsoft macro viruses
No direct spending of high-level budgets,
Trust grows step-by-step
Not all of the migration steps must happen simultaneously.

Minor obstacles:

Sometimes need to reformat files created in Star/Openoffice, when beeing used in Microsoft Office.
Need to rewrite proprietary Macros in Open languages.

The speech represents a chapter of a new book that I am writing with Jay S. Hill, Texas, for managers about migration to Linux.

Biography: IT journalist, MA in economics and business administration, book author with > 100 book projects in the last 20 years, some of them on Unix and Linux.

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Pladao Office the Thai localized version of OpenOffice.org

Nusorn Photpipat Managing Director, Software Design Engineer, Algorithms Co.,Ltd., 99/30 Moo 4 Software Park Building 5th Floor Unit C, Chaengwattana Rd, Klongklur, Pakkred, Nontaburi 11120 THAILAND

By endorsement of Thailand's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology and supporting of Sun Microsystems (Thailand) Ltd., Pladao Office, the open source Office Suite based on OpenOffice.org, become standard Office suite of Thai.
To localize and enable OpenOffice.org to support full functionalities of Thai language need to do bi-lingual function and special work include:

Word break engine/ Breaking Iterator
Collating order
Searching (full text search, by using breaking iterator before search)
Output method (both display and hard copy)
Spell Checker
Date/Time format
Bullet/Numbering
UI Switch (English and Thai)

And more.
The purpose of this case study is to present the reason of doing bi-lingual of both functionalities and user interface. It will show their current status, present what has been done in the past year, and discuss the road ahead showing what is going to be done in the end of this year.

Biography: Nusorn had been nominated as one of 100 Global Leader for tomorrow 2003 by World Economic Forum.

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Internationalization and Localization of OpenOffice.org The Indian Perspective

Shikha G Pillai, Bhupesh Koli National Centre for Software Technology(NCST), 68, 4th Cross, Electronics City, Hosur Road, Bangalore - 561229, India

India supports a culturally and linguistically diverse population, majority of whom are excluded from the productive usage of information technology due to the lack of standardized and economical Indian language enabled software.
OpenOffice.org is the leading office productivity suite through open-source initiatives, available with a rich feature set across all main platforms, along with internationalization and localization support for major International languages. This paper examines the development aspects, usage and prospects of OpenOffice.org internationalized and localized to cater to the Indian market.
Most Indian scripts originate from the Brahmi script and follow complex rules of layout involving consonants, vowels, special symbols, conjuncts and ligatures. Unicode encoding for Indian languages establishes a similar pattern among the scripts. In this paper, we will examine this pattern and how the orthographic rules can be used to develop Complex Text Layout algorithms for Indian scripts. Also explored are storage and rendering aspects of Indian text, along with font technologies suitable for Indian scripts.
The Internationalization(i18n) and Localization(l10n) framework of OpenOffice.org sets guidelines for localization and internationalization work of the suite in other languages. The project BharateeyaOO.o commenced on the lines of these frameworks, to achieve Indian language support in OpenOffice.org. With initiatives for localizations in major languages of India, Complex Text Layout support, Indian locales, dictionary support and collation algorithms, the project aims at a completely "Indianized" office suite packaged economically for the Indian user. This paper concludes with an insight into the development, implementation details and progress of this project.

Biography: Shikha G Pillai and Bhupesh Koli are staff scientists at the National Centre for Software Technology (Bangalore) researching in Indian language processing, script encoding, font technology and globalization aspects. They have been involved for the past 21 months, in the project "BharateeyaOO.o" for development of localization and internationalization support for major Indian languages in OpenOffice.org. Their work has been registered at http://l10n.openoffice.org/languages.html.

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The ja.openoffice.org project now and beyond

Maho Nakata ja project owner Kyoto University, 2-8 Fukunokawa Haitsu, Fukunokawa City 1, Okazaki, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8326, Japan Takashi Nakamoto ja project comitter Shibuya Makuhari Senior High School, 1-14-5 Mizuho, Hanamigawa-ku, Chiba City, Chiba, 262-0026, Japan

This session focuses on the introductions of ja project activities including ja project overview, ja-dev technical issues and other sub projects including translating project.

Biography: Maho Nakata: Study quantum chemistry at Kyoto Univ., and will be a Ph.D in Mar. 2003. Maho Nakata has been a ja native language project leader since Dec. 2002. He has also been a committer of FreeBSD since Oct. 2002.
Takashi Nakamoto: Student at Shibuya Makuhari Senior High School. Takashi Nakamoto has been a ja native language project developer since Dec. 2002.

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Please Note: Program content subject to change.