OpenOffice.org on three
continents A Real Life Case Study
Michael Bona Vorstand/CIO skilldeal AG,
Gitschiner Strasse 94, 10969 Berlin, Germany
The case study presents reasons for, obstacles and
experiences of a migration from MS Office to
OpenOffice.org in the context of a small but very
international company.
The Case Study is based on a real project and shows
how OpenOffice.org (OOo) helped a small company gain
a competitive cost advantage over much larger
competitors and helped the IT infrastructure keep up
with the rapid growth of the company. It is also a
demonstration of the potential benefits and risks of
a migration. The case study is divided into four
parts:
Before migration: "Migration
Corp." is a small but very international company.
The roughly 20 employees work in six offices on
three continents and have five working languages in
everyday business. In an industry dominated by
three global giants, "Migration Corp." manages
rapid growth thanks to innovative products and
rigid cost control. In support of this strategy the
complete IT has been outsourced. The outsourcing
service company is asked to come up with solutions
to provide a reliable IT-infrastructure at very low
cost. An audit of the existing IT shows that a
significant part of IT costs is spent on licenses.
At the same time, management has trouble tracking
all licenses due to dispersed organisation and
rapid growth. As one measure, the outsourcing
service company suggests migration to
OpenOffice.org on clients. The Case Study shows a
number of interesting and not widely discussed
reasons why the management was initially sceptical
but eventually agreed.
Migration: OpenOffice.org is
rolled out in several stages together with a
company-wide standard desktop installation. Install
glitches for multi-user installations and the
complexity of adding dictionaries are two examples
for the challenges of the standard install which
are eventually overcome. All in all, the process is
fairly smooth. The Case Study shows the problems of
the roll-out and how they were solved.
After migration: Seven months
after migration, the result is largely positive.
Most users are happy with OOo even though not all
have received training. Calls for end user support
have gone done quite quickly and most problems in
exchanging documents have been resolved. The Case
Study shows what issues remain and presents a
number of suggestions for a smooth migration.
Conclusion and Outlook:
"Migration Corp." is now a convinced OOo convert.
OOo has become a cornerstone of the IT
infrastructure and will be employed in a number of
new and unexpected ways. In the planning stages are
plug-ins for custom financial functions and using a
database for file storage, indexing and archiving.
To make this happen, "Migration Corp." hopes for an
effective and mutually beneficial dialogue with
fellow users and the development community.
Biography: Michael Bona is CIO at skilldeal AG,
a Berlin based IT-Consulting and Outsourcing company.
He holds a management degree from ESCP-EAP - The
European School of Management. Bona has worked on IT
projects in several European countries before
co-founding skilldeal AG in 2000. The focus of his work
are innovative and cost-optimised solutions for small
and medium companies - often resulting in projects
based on Free or Open Source Software.
Lutz Höger Product Manager, User
Experience Christian Jansen Product
Specialist, User Experience Matthias
Müller-Prove Product Manager, User
ExperienceSun Microsystems / Star Office
Software Entwicklungs GmbH, Sachsenfeld 4, 20097
Hamburg, Germany, Nick Richards
This panel will concentrate on usability issues of
OpenOffice.org. It will tackle the general conception
that open-source software and usable software exclude
each other. A team of professional usability experts,
together with user interface contributors of the
OpenOffice.org community can create an Office product
that holds its own in the face of Office suite
competition.
Biography: Lutz Höger (TBD);
Christian Jansen has held a position on the StarOffice
User Experience team for over 4 years.
As a member of this user experience team at Sun Microsystems,
he plays a major role in the product design of StarOffice.
His responsibilities include designing and specifying the
graphical user interface and the functionalitly behind it and
in so doing, addressing easy-to-use-interface needs.
Specific areas include color schemes and accessibility
considerations. He holds a degree in Communication Design
from the 'Hamburger Akademie für Kommunikationsdesign und
Art Direction'
(Hamburg Academy for Communication Design and Art Direction);
Matthias Müller-Prove is a creative
computer scientist. His reputation as a first-class
human-computer interaction expert is based on nine
years of direct experience designing professional
software interfaces for international operating
companies. Before joining the StarOffice User
Experience team at Sun Microsystems, he played a
significant role in designing the user interface of
Adobe GoLive. He holds a degree from University of
Hamburg (Dipl.-Inform.) and is member of the usability
professionals association upa and ACM/SIGCHI;
Nick Richards is the Marketing Project Lead at OpenOffice.org.
This means he gets in the way of programmers, asks lots
of questions and talks too much. He is in the final year
of a History degree at King's College London.
The
Open ECDL: how to use opensource software -
namely OpenOffice.org – for
delivering ECDL courses
Egidio Pentiraro Advisor, EdOsNet.org, Via
Ragazzi del 99 n. 19, I - 23100 Sondrio SO,
Italy
ECDL stands for "European Computer Driving
Licence". ECDL is an internationally recognised
qualification that enables people to certify their
competence in essential computer skills &
knowledge. In the past, the ECDL was mainly based on
Microsoft products: Windows, Office, Internet Explorer,
Outlook.
Recently, the ECDL has become a really ' vendor
independent certification '. Now, the ECDL Tests can be
performed everywhere with opensource software, such as:
GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Evolution.
