Archive for the ‘OpenOffice’ tag
A Microsoft Openoffice kritikája
A Microsoft szerint az OpenOffice fenntartása drága, nem jár hozzá megfelelő terméktámogatás, és a bevezetése rontja a szervezetek hatékonyságát.
Magyarország is nyit a szabad szoftverek felé
Nyitrai Zsolt, a Nemzeti Fejlesztési Minisztérium infokommunikációért felelős államtitkára köszöntötte az éves nemzetközi OpenOffice.org konferencia részvevőit a rendezvény plenáris ülésén 2010. szeptember 1-jén, Budapesten, a Parlamentben. A nyílt szabványokat fejlesztő közösségek és támogató vállalatok rangos találkozójának idén először ad otthont Magyarország. Az államtitkár beszédében kiemelte: az új kormány megnyitja az állami – közigazgatási és oktatási – informatika kapuit a szabad szoftverek világa előtt.
A Parlament beengedi a nyílt forráskódot
Szakmai konferenciával ünneplik meg Budapesten az OpenOffice.org tizedik születésnapját. Az eseményt a magyar kormány is támogatja jelenlétével.
Interjú a szabad szoftver helyzetéről, korlátairól és lehetőségeiről
A Magyarországi Nyílt Dokumentum Formátum Szövetség egy konferencia keretében ünnepli az OpenOffice.org tizedik születésnapját szeptember 1-3. között Budapesten. Ivacs Gabriellát, a szövetség elnökét, az OSA Archívum/Közép Európai Egyetem munkatársát kérdeztük az évfordulóról, a szabad szoftver helyzetéről és korlátairól és lehetőségeiről.
- Az utóbbi években nem történt jelentős előremozdulás a Linux helyzetét tekintve – ezzel a gondolattal kezdte a beszélgetést Ivacs Gabriella, majd így folytatta:
Open Norway: Norwegian Broadcasting Moves to OpenOffice and ODF
Norway appreciates free standards. After the government a year ago recommended Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora next to their commercial alternatives MP3 and H.264 as standards for audio and video files, this year it focuses on ODF as the standard document format. According to the governmnent’s Reference Catalog for IT Standards, the recommendation should become binding in January of 2011.
The first larger institution, Norway’s national radio and TV corporation, Norsk rikkringkasting (NRK), is now taking the move to OpenOffice seriously. The conversion is based on the better ODF support, therefore the NRK is running many of its clients on Mac OS X because the Mac version of Microsoft’s Office Suite doesn’t support the open document format. Another reason for the move is the Microsoft Office licensing costs.
From the first of March the majority of the 4,300 NRK clients will run OpenOffice as the standard. The 850 or so Mac systems will get OpenOffice installed in the coming weeks, even thin clients will use it. Only administrative systems will continue to use both office suite versions, with users to decide which one they prefer.
Successful Pilot Project
Before the announced conversion, the NRK has already begun a successful pilot project in Tyholt that, according to project leader Steinar Bjørlykke, surprisingly went without a hitch. Only a couple of Visual Basic scripts and template layouts caused some problems with a few documents with embedded audio files, which was resolved with some plugins. Visual Basic was to be avoided as much as possible for the scripting problem.
A benefit was also noticed in that OpenOffice opened some Word and Excel documents significantly faster than the corresponding Microsoft programs.
Source: NRKbeta site
Ministry of Education recommends Open Source
The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source.
The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”
The ministry published the statement on its website on 17 July, three days before the official end of the ‘WiOO w Szkole’ (‘Free and Open Software in Schools’) campaign, a promotion tour run by 150 volunteers of the Polish Foundation on Open Source (Fwioo).
The Wioo w Szkole volunteers in the past ten months visited 99 schools, mostly junior and high schools, totalling 4506 students, in 43 villages and cities. “During these meetings, our volunteers presented Open Source applications, answered questions and cleared up doubts. They often also helped in installing the software on the PCs in school computer labs and on school servers”, says Fwioo member Łukasz Nowicki, who began organising the campaign at the end of the summer in 2007 in Poznan, where Fwioo was founded.
Where possible, the Wioo w Szkole campaign volunteers used local Open Source enthusiasts. In the city of Bielsko Biała for example, all schools participated in the campaign. “We combined our visit to the city with the Free Software day, which attracted local Open Source developers and we even managed to interest university teachers and several local police officers.”
About 30 percent of the schools visited by the Wioo w Szkole campaign have switched at least partly to Open Source. Most of these schools configured their PCs to run a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, alongside Windows. Nowicki: “Some school staff told us they are still considering a switch, others would use the summer vacation to for instance install OpenOffice and a few schools said they would switch to Open Source when they renew their computer labs.”
A good example of a school using Open Source is, according to Nowicki, High School No 15 in the city of Wrocław. “At this school teachers show students how to use Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. This broad knowledge base lets students develop their interests without limiting them to a specific platform.”
Popularise
The campaign to popularise Open Source will be renewed in the coming school year, Nowicki says. “We want to make all Polish teachers and students aware that they have a choice in applications and computer platforms. Students should not finish school knowing only about one type of software. They should know enough about computer environments to be able to use programmes they have not seen before. “
Nowicki is particularly pleased with some school district supervisors that embraced the campaign aims and are promoting Open Source software among all their school principals. “We hope our grass-root initiative will create a snow ball effect, making Open Source a regular part of the school curriculum. The ministry’s statement will certainly help.”
More information:
Ministry of Education’s statement (in Polish)
Fwioo, Polish Foundation on Open Source
Source: Osor
European governments help increase ODF interoperability
Representatives from three European member states, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, took part in the second Open Document Format (ODF) interoperability workshop held in the Italian town of Orvieto at the beginning of this month.
Fabio Pistella, president of Italy’s Center for ICT in Public Administrations (CNIPA), in his opening address told the attendees of the workshop that Italy is about to start a three-year promotion campaign on open source software, writes Roberto Gallopini, one of the organisers of the ODF workshop on his web blog.
The ODF plugfest in Orvieto brought together about thirty ODF developers and government representatives. It was the second such meeting, the first of which took place in the Netherlands in June.
Bart Hanssens, interoperability expert at Fedict, the Belgian Federal ICT advisory body, showed attendees how to sign ODF documents using the country’s electronic identity card. He explained that Fedict wants users to be able to sign sourcedocuments, not only PDF.
The application, written in Java and at the moment only fit to be used in combination with OpenOffic, is in beta, Hanssens said. “But it is already very stable.”
NOiV, the Dutch resource centre on open source and open standards, on 3 November announced its Officeshots web service, that allows users to compare the output of their ODF documents in several competing office applications. The service is available in a number of languages, including English, French, German, Chinese and Dutch.
Translation
Next to representatives and developers from large IT firms such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, the plugfest also attracts a number of other IT companies. Jakub Ondrušek, a developer at Comsultia, a Slovakian IT company, for instance discussed his work on converting DocBook and ODF documents. The Hungarian IT company Multiráció and the University of Szeged presented their joint research and development work on EuroOffice, an version of OpenOffice extended with tools such as translation services and ways to display geographic data. Dirk Vollmar, from the German IT company Dialogika updated the attendees on the company’s work to convert OOXML and ODF.
“This is a unique workshop where commercial vendors, governments and open source developers discuss updates to their implementations of ODF. For example, we showed Microsoft that it could improve how it stores illustrations and graphics in ODF”, commented Michiel Leenaars, director of the Dutch Internet Society and one of the organisers of the plugfest.
Galoppini, institutional relationship manager of the Italian OpenOffice association: “These workshops are useful to educate governments about the fact that open standards are first and foremost about participation. True interoperability demands implementers’ good-will, but also more participated open standards processes and practises.”
More information:
ODF plugfest in Orvieto
Plugfest presentations
Officeshots
Galoppini’s blog
Source: Osor
Nov. 17. 2009.
Belgian government chooses OpenDocument (2006, 2008)
In a blow to Microsoft, Belgium’s government departments will be instructed to use an open file format for internal communications.
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is to be the standard format for exchanging documents within the government, according to a proposal that is expected to be approved by Belgium’s Council of Ministers on Friday. The plan increases the pressure from governments worldwide on Microsoft to embrace open standards.
From September 2008 on, all document exchanges within the services of the Belgian government will have to be in an open, standard format, according to the proposal. ODF is the only accepted standard in the proposal. Earlier drafts of the Belgian proposal had put ODF and Microsoft’s own Open XML format (which is to be included in Office 2007) on equal footing.
Peter Strickx, general manager for architecture and standards of Fedict, the organization that coordinates the ICT policy of the Belgian federal government, commented on the proposal in an interview with ZDNet Belgium.
“Increasingly, we are seeing e-mail and electronic documents being used in communication between citizens and the government and between companies and the government,” Strickx said. “To avoid becoming dependent on any particular supplier, we are moving towards open standards.” A draft of ODF was accepted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in May.
From September 2008 onwards, Belgium’s federal services must use ODF when exchanging documents, though other formats will still be allowed for internal use, Strickx confirmed. However, Belgium is leaving the door open for Open XML.
“Open XML today does not exist, as there is no product on the market that supports it. Once it is available as a product and proposed to the ISO, it is possible that the format will also be accepted,” Strickx said. However, there will be an additional hurdle: Open XML must also be proven to be easily convertible to and from ODF.
This would appear to leave Microsoft with a simple choice: Convince the Belgian government that Open XML is an open standard well on the way to ISO-approval, or support ODF. The latter may be the simpler task, as the OpenDocument Foundation is already working on a plug-in for Microsoft Office that would add ODF support.
However, Strickx would not confirm that the Belgian government is envisaging a migration away from Microsoft Office and toward software that supports ODF, such as Open Office. “We are analyzing the impact” of the move to an open format for document exchange on the internal software usage, Strickx said.
Belgium would be the first country to opt for open document standards in this way.
According to Strickx, the Belgian strategy is likely to gain a following. He claimed France and Denmark are considering similar moves.
Source: CNet
OpenOffice boom Belgiumban
Belgiumban villámgyors tempóban növekszik a nyílt forráskódú irodai szoftverek használati aránya az állami intézményekben. Mind az OpenOffice programcsomag, mind az ODF nyílt szabvány alkalmazása egyre látványosabban terjed. A flamand hulladékgazdálkodási hivataltól kezdve – a szintén flamand – Schoten városának vezetéséig, az antwerpeni kikötő-igazgatóságtól Limburg tartományig számos állami és regionális szerv döntött az OS-megoldás bevezetése mellett.
