Abstracts of Conference Papers - Friday

The Session describes procedures of migrating small and middle-sized companies to OpenOffice.org, with focus on migrating from Microsoft Office. Including integration of OpenOffice.org with phpGroupWare for forms, practical experience and pitfalls in real life.

Lars Piepho works at probusiness AG since 2001. Main tasks are OpenSource software consulting and developement. Special experiences in OpenOffice.org and phpGroupWare.

The talk is done on the behalf of the Coordination and Advisory Board of the Federal Government of Germany. This talk shows, how the federal public adminstration is using OpenOffice.org. It also gives a view of the experience in migrations and tells where the problems for the users are to migrate. Usability and acceptance are very important for users, but also the communication with others in the federal public administration. Therefore the focus of this talk is, how to make it easy to migrate and showing the problems which could be solved by the developers. A short overview on the european situation of open document formats is also given.

Egon Troles was a member of the Coordination and Advisory Board of the Federal Government (KBSt) until 2002. In this time he was the project leader of the Internet Backbone Project, which is a part of the Federal Republic's Government Network between Berlin and Bonn. He also was one of the authors of the KBSt-Letter 2/2000, which proposed Open Source Software for the public adminstration. Now he is working at the Federal Data Protection Commissioneer in the Department of technological dataprotection. As a former colleague of the Coordination- and Advisory Board he is often working on the strategical aspects of Open Source Software for the public administration. He is also a member of the european expert group on open document formats.

OpenOffice.org at the "French Institute of Statutory Auditors": a case study in building OOo-based business applications and in integrating OOo with a CMS / Collaborative Platform.

As part of the CNCC (Compagnie Générale des Commissaires aux comptes – French Institure of Statutory Auditors – CNCC is well-know in the “audit world”) extranet project led by Unilog and Nuxeo, Indesko has developed the following functionalities:

• "Audit folders": an application that manages Calc spreadsheets created by auditors during their missions (statutory audits) on location, then provides on-line diff / merge of Calc spreadsheets in a visual way (using XMLDiff and XSLT), enables collaboration for the audirtors' team (versionning, forums, indexing, etc.), and creates financial reports.
• Integration of OOo with Nuxeo CPS, an open-source Zope-based CMS developped by Nuxeo. This includes "Edit in Place", SSL (client certificate authentication) and PKI support for better security. UNO Pythons modules provide those features into OOo.
• A full XML transformation chain for publishing books (accounting norms, law comments, books...) using OOo as a DocBook XML editor. The full chain is :
  1. Authoring with OOo and collaboration using CPS's features. Contributors author OOo documents and manage them in the collaboration portal. Documents can follow an dynamic approval workflow (cascading delegation and approbation), and are always securely and surely sent to the server from OOo, using SSL Client Certificate Authentication.
  2. Live transformation and validation of OOo document into Docbook XML.
  3. Docbook is transformed into HTML (for direct on-line publishing with CPS) and PDF (for printing)
• Creation of a custom OOo distribution for several thousand users at the auditors firms (this includes : custom UNO modules, custom macros, custom templates, easy and packaged installation process, etc.).

Biography: Eric Barroca is CEO of Indesko and project and sales manager at Nuxeo. He managed some large project using Nuxeo CPS (French Interior Ministry, French "Justice" Ministry) or OOo (CNCC). He author of several technical papers for OOo marketing and promotion.

Digital Signatures are an important feature for Authentication. They can be used to verify if a document really comes from a certain author and that the content was not modified. This information can also be used to configure which macros to trust and which not. OOo 2.0 will introduce Digital Signatures based in W3C XMLDSIG recommendations.