NeoOffice/J logo and graphics???

[jjmckenzie51]

[sardisson]

I think we've pretty well excised the hype from the announcement. "Ed" might sound a bit enthusiastic yet, but what "he's" saying is all true.

http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/NeoOffice/J_1.1_Announcement

There are no more Bizarro-Patrick quotes (in fact, no Patrick quotes at all).

Right now I think the announcement is in pretty good shape (some real Patrick quotes would be nice, and we need to get Ed's approval for the "Ed" quotes), but otherwise I don't think there's major work needed on the announcement. Just all the ancillary stuff in the Press Kit.

Smokey

[pluby]

[Waldo]

[sardisson]

The section in which fantasy-Patrick-cousin-of-Steve-Jobs was orginally providing quotes was the "development and testing" section (well, there was another generic quote elsewhere, but it was totally excised instead of commented-out):

[sardisson]

I did a lot of playing around in the press kit tonight. Someone needs to read through and proof my editing

Also, Oscar, your screenshot looks like it is pre-patch-whatever that gave us the lighter colors. Can you check that when you get a chance?

I forget what the issues were with "displaying" vs. "linking" the logo-type images (other than the images are going to be large in some cases, and they don't have a "local" url [my iDisk), so there's that to be decided.

What other logo-type images (or sizes) do we want to provide?

Smokey

[JKT]

Slightly off the subject... the Press Kit page doesn't render correctly in OmniWeb 5.1:



All the other wiki pages do... it is just this one page for some reason. I haven't checked any other browsers (other than Safari 2.0, where it renders fine) but it may be an issue to be aware of.

[ovvldc]

[rays]

Rather than post directly in the wiki, I thought I would share our contribution (requested some weeks back) about the switch to NeoOfficeJ at the World Scout Bureau central office.

"This release of NeoOfficeJ 1.1 is a very welcome development," explains Ray Saunders, Director of Information Technology at the World Scout Bureau, based in Geneva, Switzerland. "Minimising total cost of ownership is obviously important to an international voluntary organization, such as ours. The real benefits lie elsewhere, however. With NeoOfficeJ now running OpenOffice seemlessly on 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 have begun the process of demonstrating to our 28 million Scouts worldwide that switching to open-standards based software is a genuine commitment to breaking down artificial barriers that have been built between peoples and, ultimately, to building a better world."


Edit: Comments/reactions/suggestions welcome!

[MrGruff]

Great stuff, Ray. It's an amazingly positive case study.

Only two micro-niggles:

'seamless' not 'seemless' in sentence four.

Could that 'however' in the third sentence go at the beginning to make the sentence stronger? Maybe it could be tweaked to read:

'Minimising total cost of ownership is obviously important to an international voluntary organization, such as ours; however, the real benefits lie elsewhere.'

MrGruff <----- who is very much in favour of semi-colons

[rays]

[sardisson]

It warms my heart

I always prefer to try and refer to apps by their correct names/spellings, i.e., NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org, in anything that we're readying for media consumption.

Could you mention something about the "fuctionality"/"training" side of the switch, too? I.e., "Neo/J seamlessly opened our Word documents with only minor formatting discrepancies, and our users felt right at home in Neo/J after a few minutes of studying the different names for functions" or some similar expression of "positive honesty"?

Provided, of course, that those were the results--I know you've mentioned a few Excel glitches, but my impression has been that by and large there was nothing "serious", only minor things one might expect when switching something, like different controls on your new car's radio....

A reassuring "hard facts of functionality" to go along with the "moral advocacy" would make the "migration story" even stronger

(If I don't make any sense here, I'm tired and I aplogize...)

Thanks so much for writing this up, Ray!

Smokey

[rays]

"This release of NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a very welcome development," explains Ray Saunders, Director of Information Technology at the World Scout Bureau, based in Geneva, Switzerland. "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.

"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 will have different names from, for example, 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.

"If I had to single-out one factor as having contributed most to our migration, it would be NeoOffice/J's use of the existing native Mac OS X fonts already installed in your systems. That meant no font substitutions required when converting our old documents to the OpenOffice.org format. 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.

"I hope our experience can serve as an encouragement to others. We have begun the process of demonstrating to our 28 million Scouts worldwide that switching to open-standards based software is a genuine commitment to breaking down the artificial barriers that can exist between peoples and, ultimately, to building a better world."

As before, your feedback would be helpful. Is it too long? Is this hampering the impact? Your thoughts, please.

[sardisson]

The way I see it, Ray's story is going to be the "central" piece of our "testimonials" section, partly because it's a good one and partly because Ray was convenient to contact and has been a good sport about the matter So I don't see "long" as being a problem in an abstract sense, as this will likely be the most detailed story we'll have.

I don't think it's too long the focused sense, either; we'll see what others say.

On the other hand, the section about fonts (plus waaay too much time staring at the Announcement and the Press Kit this weekend) has made me realize the absurdity of some of our "selling points." They're not absurd if you're familiar with the state of OOo on the Mac, but what other new Mac app makes a claim "uses your Mac fonts"...that's a standard, expected, almost sine qua non of being a Mac app We have lots of stuff for the OOo crowd in our release, but not so much (other than "it just works" and "it's free and free (libre)") for the MSO crowd.... This has no real bearing on Ray's draft, other than the fonts tie-in...I'm rambling a bit mentally again....

Smokey

[ovvldc]