OfficeBuzz

It has been a bit quiet. On this blog. And apparently also at the Dutch government with regard open standards. If that would be the case at all, then now there is some very good news. In the attendance discussing the "Actieplan Open Overheid" ("Plan for action on open government") the parliament adopted a resolution to make the use of open standards mandatory. Mandatory for the countries government and the regional/local administrations. By law. This, finally, will put an end to the halfheartedly policy in this area. An excellent example is easy to spot at the parliament's website: the resolution is published in an old proprietary format.. In any case: excellent news. And thanks to MP Astrid Oosenbrug for her competent and tireless work for a saner approach for the countries ICT. And of course to all other MP's that understand the importance of this. The resolution also asks the government to improve sharing the knowledge they have on open source softwa...

The giant from Redmond must be desperate since it has to use a controversial story from a relatively small Italian city to combat open source software, as in the mean time many larger deployments also in Italy are happy with LibreOffice and the numbers produced by Provincia di Perugia prove the opposite of the Microsoft-publication. Microsoft writes about the switch of the city of Pesaro from OpenOffice to Office 365. There are however many questions around the publication that should provide backing for the switch. Yet Microsoft uses that publication on it's website for promotion goals. There are several facts that make the publication controversial. It mentions, for example, the sum of € 300.000 for migration and training costs and extra phone costs of € 85 a year without any data to back that. Sonia Motegiove, an Italian IT consultant, comments that an extensive training for 600 people would cost € 25.000 maximum. The publication also claims that the interface would cause p...

LibreOffice is entering the mobile and on-line space, and we'll see full open source private cloud solutions soon. Great! Still sometimes I'm forced to look back. Simply because the name "Open Office" is known by many people, based on its great history. I have to explain regularly what LibreOffice is and what makes it so much different. To put some more weight on the latter, my colleague Barend and me worked on comparison of the features of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. Read it here . Be warned: it's a nearly 60 page document. It focuses on areas as feasibility, smart use, quality and improvements, localization and more. It lists hundreds of smaller and larger improvements in LibreOffice, and only few in Apache OpenOffice. There is a notable difference between this information and many comparisons of LibreOffice with Apache OpenOffice found in articles on the internet. Journalists often seem to lack time for a better analysis of the vast amount of feature...

What brings more joy then publishing a guide on Document Freedom Day to help scholars making beautiful work with a free open document standard? Therefore today the Dutch Language LibreOffice-community made available the publication "Maak je mooiste werkstuk met LibreOffice Writer" ("Create your most beautiful work with LibreOffice Writer"). The guide is for scholars in the age of 11 and older. Currently the publication is Dutch only, but will be available in other languages soon thanks to the ODF Authors-community. There will also be a version for scholars in the age of 9-11 year. Download here . And read the full announcement here .

During trainings in LibreOffice Writer, that we give at customers offices or in the LibreOffice-Trainingcenter , a standard part is how to handle AutoCorrect. As long as people don't know what happens, AutoCorrect is a source of annoyance and errors. Once they've learned how it works, this changes drastically. Recently during a training for a regional office if the Dutch Refugee Council there was attention for the example "aanrijken" that is replaced by "aanreiken" through the AutoCorrect function. (Since we know AutoCorrect is language dependent, it's time for a little help in this English version of the original Dutch blogpost. The correct word "aanreiken" means: hand over, give something to someone else. The wrong word "aanrijken" has the part "rijk" what means rich. So, now back to the plot of the story ;) ) During the training I gave the next, free, explanation for the example: we see enough of the 'aanrijken...

Let me start with the second part of the head line of this article. Munich is a success. And not a little one too. Already during the 9 year long migration to LiMux (looking for a reason why Microsoft can't count 9 ;) ) the saved money counts to 11 Mln Euro. From the money spent to consultancy, nearly 50% has benefited (regional) SMB. The user satisfaction has clearly increased - though there are still items in which improving is possible. More then 14.000 of the 15.000 systems have been migrated. A larger number then was set as target. De savings on licenses will count, year after year, millions. (Also see Symposium LibrOffice in de Praktijk ) Now is this news? Not really. But it is something we cannot repeat enough - brief and clear. There only needs to be one Microsoft-partner driven 'investigation' ( see.. and this.. ) or one new major who recently has been doing business with Microsoft ( see.. ) and there are new headlines seeding wrong impressions. FUD. Let's ...

Now and then people ask me about LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Usually I point to the statistics about number of developers and such. And to the large difference in new functions. And of course the fixed old bugs. After explaining that to an artist, he came up with a nice drawing that I don't want to hide for you. A nice and funny drawing. On the other hand it's of course possible that such a split in a - originally single - project has negative impact on peoples joy in work and ambitions. And might that be the case - it's something that I always regret - I do hope that time will have a healing influence. As it usually does.