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City Of Austin Migrating To OpenOffice.org
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge.com has a story up this morning about the City of Austin and the results of their pilot program on OpenOffice.org. The bottom line is this: they have found that more than 80% of the city's 5K desktops can use OO.o instead of MS Office. Let the migrations begin!"
....sounds like Austin has a savvy fellow in the CIO spot.
The Army reading list
IBM's Linux Technology Center is in Austin...
Certainly makes sense that they're going to need to solve that dependancy before they switch those people to OO.org...
You obviously didn't read the article, however you also failed to consider something anyway. There are still things that OOo can't do that MS Office can. For example, I can't fully switch because I need the chart/graph capabilities that Excel has, but OOo doesn't. For Austin, it's a specific application. OOo is great for most people, but it's not a complete replacement just yet.
G
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
From: Scott Brown
Subject: [alg] Another Open Source win at the City
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 07:57:01 -0600
To: alg@austinlug.org
I thought a few of you might be interested in this...
We just concluded our first round of "official" Linux pilots, with one
of those being an OpenOffice replacement of Microsoft Office. It turns
out that the limited pilot we did (40 users) provided enough information
to be able to start converting some departments and users over to OO
from MS Office. First on the schedule is my department, Communications
and Technology Management, which will be having MS Office *uninstalled*
and OO installed in it's place on the majority of department desktops.
That should be around 300 people (we can't get everyone off MS Office
right now as we have one major application, the Agenda Management System
for the City Council, that requires the MS programs).
Training programs and help desk support is being put in place so it
looks like OO will be there for the long-term. Our pilot figured out
that about 80% of the users at the City could use OO instead of MS
Office so, at the very least, the City will not be paying Redmond for
anymore new licenses and at the very best, it will start converting
those apps that require MS Office over to something that will work in
the new OO environment.
We're finishing up the documentation for the rest of the pilots so I'll
keep ya'll posted...
-s.
--
Scott Brown
Technology and Support Services
OpenNetworks
website: http://www.opennetworks.org
DMCA only bans defeating 'copy protection'. If there's some obfuscation in there that's claimed to be 'copy protection', then the DMCA applies. As it is, the format is totally obscure but that's just a concequence of bad design. As a result it's legal. You can't copyright file formats. You can patent them, but MS hasn't done that with current office formats.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
See the comment of janderk at the end. Essentially, he tried to convert a Dutch school but because of this bug, he failed.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
I've tested Access 2000 under Linux using Codeweaver's CrossOver Office product - http://www.codeweavers.com/
It works very well, and i have complicated vba code running - the reports previewed fine, queries good, forms, etc...
you can download a version to do testing. Access was the only thing holding me back from moving to Linux - i use it all the time
What i would love to see would be Corel open sourcing the Paradox db so it could be ported to Linux - that was a great platform...
pivot tables == data pilot.
:)
learn it, love it.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
The actual name of the software is OpenOffice.org. The software is not, not, NOT named OpenOffice, or Open Office.
The reason is because Open Office would conflict with the trademark of some Korean office suite.
If more open source software projects would name themselves after their domain name, it would make it really easy for customers to know where to go for information. Imagine if Mozilla.org would do this.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I work for a large company and we are quietly converting many of the Access databases here to a MySQL database + PHP web frontend.
importing the data took us 10 minutes.
someone barely familiar with PHP can write the frontend within 2 months. (I knew ZERO php before I started this project. 2 months later... I'm 90% finished and we extendedto server 4 offices instead of one.)
There is no excuse to stick with Access based database. Even a visual Basic programmer can pick up PHP withing a day or two.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.