Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2005 9:03 am Post subject: Third (and final) draft for comment
When the World Scout Bureau's central office in Geneva, Switzerland, took delivery of 10 new Apple iMac G5 computers at the beginning of 2005, it was the ideal opportunity to assess whether migration to a free, open source office suite was a viable option for the 30-strong team working there.
"This release of NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a very welcome development," explains Ray Saunders, Director of Information Technology. "Minimising total cost of ownership is obviously important to an international voluntary organization, such as ours; however, the real benefits lie elsewhere. With NeoOffice/J now integrating OpenOffice.org seamlessly onto our Macs, our users here have joined the growing numbers worldwide who are very happy to work with the only truly multi-platform, multi-lingual office suite around. We can now build on this real-world experience by demonstrating in a very practical way to our 28 million Scouts worldwide that switching to open-standards based software is a genuine commitment to breaking down barriers between peoples and, ultimately, to building a better world.
"Migrating our users and their documents to NeoOffice/J has been straightforward. In fact, generally easier than I expected it to be! Visually, NeoOffice/J is very similar to what we had before - just a few items in different menus and some functions in Calc have different names from their Excel equivalents. On the whole, we've found what we needed to know either in the Help menu or in the manuals available from the OOoAuthors.org documentation project. Of the hundreds of legacy word-processing documents we've opened, only a very few have required any attention to formatting discrepancies.
"We're now beginning to play to the strengths of NeoOffice/J, including its logical use of paragraph and page styles. For example, basic newsletters for which we would previously have only considered using desktop publishing software are now being prepared completely in NeoOffice/J. Once a styled template is ready, using NeoOffice/J greatly simplifies and shortens the production cycle while maintaining realistic standards and enabling more users to see their projects through from conception to realisation. We are also able to produce multi-lingual presentations - for example, a mix of French, English and Arabic - with this free software and exchange them easily with our regional office colleagues working with Microsoft Office on their Windows computers in Cairo. That has felt incredibly liberating!
"I have no regrets about the decision we took back in January 2005. Realistically, the issues we've faced by migrating to NeoOffice/J have not been so very different from similar issues which we would have faced anyway by following the more conservative and costly upgrade path for our previous office suite. I hope our positive experience can serve as an encouragement to others." _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2005 5:11 am Post subject:
Looks pretty good to me too - out of interest do you have any real-world examples that can be made public to go along with the following paragraph? It might be nice to provide some links to those to show what can be achieved:
Quote:
"We're now beginning to play to the strengths of NeoOffice/J, including its logical use of paragraph and page styles. For example, basic newsletters for which we would previously have only considered using desktop publishing software are now being prepared completely in NeoOffice/J. Once a styled template is ready, using NeoOffice/J greatly simplifies and shortens the production cycle while maintaining realistic standards and enabling more users to see their projects through from conception to realisation. We are also able to produce multi-lingual presentations - for example, a mix of French, English and Arabic - with this free software and exchange them easily with our regional office colleagues working with Microsoft Office on their Windows computers in Cairo. That has felt incredibly liberating!
do you have any real-world examples that can be made public
I expect to see the first fruits of these recent developments posted on our web site shortly (days, rather than weeks), and I will add links to the press kit story then when they are finalised. All the current official documents for our World Scout Conference to be held in Tunisia this September (theme: Breaking Down Barriers) are being produced using NeoOffice/J whereas for all previous events we resorted to PageMaker. These are pretty simple layouts but are getting the job done much easier and quicker,not relying on just one or two users of DTP to produce the end product.
We'll also be launching a new occasional newsletter on Partnerships which will be produced using only NeoOffice/J. Then there are a couple of our 'Promising Practices' series in the pipeline which will probably demonstrate the migration from DTP best as you will be able to compare one of the existing PageMaker versions with the new NeoOffice/J version. That should be available online by the end of next week, all being well. _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
As promised, I have posted the article in the wiki sandbox, complete with links to sample documents created in NeoOffice/J and referred to in the article. Being new to wiki-world and unfamiliar with the style guide you are following for presentation of the Press Kit, I am asking Smokey to take it from there and move it into the Press Kit, making adjustments as he sees fit so that it fits on the overall scheme of things.
Thanks _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
Can I ask you just to correct a copy paste error by me? Please remove the word 'regional' from the last sentence listing our office locations. Thanks.
Also I would prefer you remove the lower down quote link which goes to a quote of mine. There's already enough of me in the testimonial. Thanks again. _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
The lower set is links to posts people have made who are hopefully being contacted by someone other than me to see if they can be used in the Press Kit, rather than a list of links that is part of the Press Kit. So you were just there as an example of the kind of posts to look for--you were never going to be on the page twice
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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