The market opportunity for OpenOffice.org integrations

My friend Roberto Galoppini speaks about business opportunities in the market for migrating customers from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. Roberto think that many of the technical difficulties that we are facing should be taken care of by Sun Microsystems. Robertos blogpost was even refered to by infoworld.com here: http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2008/12/the_market_oppo.html

When I speak to customers about taking Openoffice.org into consideration the talk often comes to mission critical business software and integration. Not long ago, I had a good talk with a company (large public energy provider). There is no doubt that they have a good business case: more than 2.000 thousand users. They would like to look into OpenOffice.org (and other F/OSS software applications), but when we began counting, we found more than 100 individual pieces of integration.

The same thing with many other companies:

• Edit your website with your favorite text editor and save directly to your website (CMS integration).
• From you customer register (CRM), do mail merge directly.
• Ask the bookkeeper to give you an overview of next month cash flow. You will get the result as a spreadsheet. The report from ERP will be created directly.

Roberto writes on his blog ( http://robertogaloppini.net/tag/openoffice-migration/ )that Sun Microsystems should help contributing to this problem. I disagree. Not that we don't need Sun, but Sun is already doing what they can and we shouldn't point our fingers at sun all the time.

Sun is already contributing (with IBM and others) to a project to ODF-Toolkit ( http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/ ) and a few extensions e.g. Sun Wiki Publisher ( http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher ) and Weblog Publisher ( http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/swp ).

Sun Microsystems are already deeply involved with this and what we need is that other IT companies will join the case and create extensions. Whats more important is, that local (domestic) companies will begin to listen to their customers and provide a real choice. Today many companies doesn't actually have a choice. The provider of ERP is making the choice for them.

The market places are different. I Denmark Sun is not an active participant. Sun StarOffice ( http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/ ) doesn't come in Danish and there is no Danish certified business partners. Not a single provider that can use the various migration tools Sun provides. This open for a new business opportunities. Small companies and freelance consultants has a good chance to find a business in this segment. In other market places the situation is different and the businesses is to be found individually in each country.

Extension: Sun Weblog publisher

This post is a actually writen in OpenOffice.org Writer and published directly on the blog. I'm using the Sun Weblog publisher.

After installing the extension you must first register your blog account information. You can do that from the extension manager or you can find do it from Tools – Settings – Internet – Weblog.

When you have writen our blogpost in writer, just select Files – Send – To Weblog.

As you can see on the screen dump above, the extension has some problems with localized strings. In this screen its mostly Swedish, but mixed with English. In other screens its a mix of Danish, English and Spanish.

When I post the entry to www.blogger.com I get an error 8in Swedish again) telling me, that the browser couldn't be found.Actually I had to edit the post manually, because the image didn't upload correctly and I couldn't add tags to the post.

It should be possible to load a list of recent posts (and edit them?). I can't make that work. The list is always empty.

Sun Weblog Publisher

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/swp

Java update adverts OpenOffice.org

For some time there has been an advert for OpenOffice.org showing on the screen as the regular Java Update downloads and installs. I'm very happy about Sun advertizing for OpenOffice.org like this and its a good way to spread the message to millions and millions of computers and users all over the world.

A few days ago I got a call from a journalist (http://www.computerworld.dk/art/45636) asking me about this. He also asked me about the small icon that appears on my desktop: Get OpenOffice.org. A click on it leads me to a Sun Jave page with link to downloading.

The icon is not a shortcut to the URL but a sjortcut to a small exe-file on my computer: ..\Sun\OpenOffice.org Installer 1.0\ooostub.exe. My first reaction was, that this will lead a lot of new users to the download site. I think its important that we (and Sun) uses this opportunity to spread the word, but I'm actually not happy that Sun is installing executables on my computer without my knowledge.

On the other hand... We know that our competitors are using much more tricky and much less honest marketing methods. One of the most frequent asked questions is this:

I bought a new computer with Microsoft Office 2007 preinstalled. Now 30 (or 60) days later, it doesn't work anymore. Hos can I edit my documents?

If we want to keep up with this, we must learn to be more agressive in marketing. But I don't think its a good thing to install executable code on computers without the users permission.

On open source communities

A small piece on open source communities in general and OpenOffice.org specific

Each time you enter a shop to buy something, this can be grosseries or a computer program, you have an expectation that it is ok and that everything works as described. You have the right to demand certain quality because you payed for what you have bought. If the new DVD player doesn't work, you can have it repaired, exchanged with another one or in the end, get your money back.

This is not the case when you use open source software from the simple reason that you didn't pay anything. Of cause you can uninstall the software. If you need a piece of software in conjunction with a guaranty, you can buy a commercial application like StarOffice from SUN Microsystems. StarOffice is a commercial version of OpenOffice.org and you can buy StarOffice with both garanties and support.

• How does the open source environment actually work ?
• How can anyone make a business when the software is free ?

From time to time I get a question from people that would like me to confirm that it actually *is* free of charge to use OpenOffice.org. "Can we use it in the company too ?" is the question.

Yes. OpenOffice.org is free of charge. Also in a company - without any limitations.

This can be true because several IT companies has found a possibility to make money on selling consulting and education. These companies doesn't make any money if the application doesn't exist, so the company is indirectly making money on supporting and helping the application development. Furthermore, several companies, organizations and governments that supports the development because they are using OpenOffice.org. By supporting the development, they make sure that the application is developed in a way that ensures OpenOffice.org to be developed in the right direction. You could call it a kind of self decided license fee. In most cases two or several companies or organization stick together and solves a specific problem in common. That way they can achieve something without each of them is getting involved directly.

In Denmark there is a lot of companies, organizations and authorities that is using OpenOffice.org, but as far as I know, only very few of them is actually giving a contribution back to the community. All members of the community are private contributers.

In the last two years of discussion on open standards and use of open source software like OpenOffice.org I have often heard that OpenOffice.org is not good enough and other programs are much better. But I have never heard from anyone that Denmark could participate and contribute to solve some of these problems. In Denmark we raise demands and criticisme, but we don't contribute.

I think this is caused by the lack of understanding for the way open source software works. And how development works.

In Denmark there is a lot of schools that is using OpenOffice.org in education. There must be some of the schools that has made some kind of education material like a syllabus or maybe even a teaching book. It would be much more effective if the schools could get together and develop this material in high quality once and release it under one of the free licenses.

The community behind OpenOffice.org in Denmark would very much like to contribute to get people together. Public schools can even get supported with fundings from the National IT- and Tele Agency.

In 2007 we started a new project in the international level of OpenOffice.org with the purpose to develop some kind of certification of users. A common goal of knowledge. The project is unfortunately partly closed for the moment, because we cant find participants.

Conclusion

Next time you wonder why something hasn't been developed yet or why you can't find a course to join or why you can't open .docx-files in OpenOffice.org or why you can't play multimedia files in presentations properly, change the question to: "How can I help to make it work ?".

You don't have to be a programmer to contribute to development. We can use anybody who can spend a few hours among friends in a wonderful community. Can you write a short how-to description or help us with graphical work or perhaps help us writing press releases. Do you know a lot of politicians or just a lot of people, you can help us promote the cause. There is always a job for everyone. And remember, its always YOU that sets the limits, so you can always say no thanks and back out for a while.

If your company uses OpenOffice.org, please remember to join the reference list on http://da.openoffice.org or http://www.openoffice.org. This is also considered a contribution.

OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Award Program

On 7 December 2007, Sun Microsystems Inc. announced a new million-dollar fund to foster innovation in six of the open-source projects it sponsors and contributes to http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/awards/index.jsp . We are pleased to report that OpenOffice.org was included. The contest, which we have titled the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Program, commences tomorrow, 30 January, and we invite OpenOffice.org Community members to participate.

What do you have to do to enter?
To win a prize?
Our rules, which will be posted later on today and linked to the OpenOffice.org homepage (www.openoffice.org), explain these and many other details, and you must read them carefully.

What are we looking for? In general terms, we are looking for superlative work that is useful to the Community; work that is challenging, that is non-trivial, and that furthers the Community as much as the software. You can enter alone or in a team; and if you are eligible, you could win a lot of money. But we explain all this in the rules, the link to which you will be able to find on the OpenOffice.org homepage.

Note: The Program ends 23 June 2008 and begins 30 January 2008.

OpenOffice.org

The goal of the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Award Program is to foster community development and innovation. All projects must be able to be subsequently worked on by the community and all work must be abide by OpenOffice.org's license scheme. There are six categories for this program: Technical, Community, Tools, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Documentation and Special. The OpenOffice.org Community Council is the final judge of the program and coordination of the judging will be done by a committee made up of some of its members. The Community Awards Program Committee includes: Louis Suárez-Potts (Sun), Pavel Janík (independent), John McCreesh (independent) and Stefan Taxhet (Sun). For program details: http://development.openoffice.org/community_innovation_program.html

And the award goes to ....

Oh - sorry. We don't have an award. Sorry, the bill will be sent to ....

Contests are fine. I might even participate myself. Its a fine way to get new contributers out of the bushes. The problem is, that a contest only takes what comes in the limited contest period. A lot of people are doing a big contribution every day. Both when a contest is running and between. What about that effort. Shouldn't that be rewarded as well ?

Sun Microsystems has announced that they will support the Sun driven open source projects with an amount of 1 million dollars.

http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/awards/index.jsp . Contest will be published within the individual projects soon. These projects are GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC.
You can find the announcement from Sun here: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071205005370&newsLang=en.

The contest for openOffice.org has not been published yet, bur further details is promised before the Christmas holidays. It'sinteresting to see what they will come up with this time.

I suggest that some of the money from Sun should be used to establish an international annual open source award. The award can be given to a person, organization or OS project that has contributed to open source in general or an individual project in particular.

I'm also thinking domestic. In Denmark we have had an annual event now for a decade, called LinuxForum. From 2008 the event has changed name to Open Source Days ( http://www.opensourcedays.org ) because the event isn't just Linux.

Why don't we establish a domestic open source award.

Summary from OOoCon2007 in Barcelona (I)

The conference in general
I participated in the conference on behalf of the Danish OpenOffice.org community http://da.openffice.org and my journey was sponsored by
Sun
Symfoni Software Denmark
DOSS

I was invited to the conference to speak about the political process in Denmark regarding the Parliament resolution B103 and the implementation of the resolution.

The conference was held at the Barcelona University right in the middle of Barcelona. It couldn't be more central and the University gave us a perfect frame for both formal and unformal meetings. The conference was arranged by the Catalonian language project and SoftCatala http://www.softcatala.org .

The conference program was very tight and it was impossible to find the time for everything. Four tracks of presentations all day long. The most important thing for me was actually to meet all the people that I only knew from emails and blogposts. To meet these people face to face was very important and I got an impression of how huge and complex the organization behind an open source project like OpenOffice.org is.

Overview of available information
All presentations are available under each day: http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme.html

I will emphasize the Keynote speak of Louis Suárez-Potts, the community manager for OpenOffice.org: http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/wednesday_186.pdf

Here is film recording of some of the sessions: http://ooocon.kiberpipa.org/ with photos.

Here is a subset of the pictures taken:: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/ooocon2007/show/

Here is my own presentation from the conference: http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/wednesday_79.pdf

I also participated in a debate on the subject ODF Impact on Industry and Governments: http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/friday_179.pdf arranged by Donald Harbison (Program Director, ODF Initiative / IBM ).

Miscellaneous things before my vacation

I'm just finishing the Danish OpenOffice.org Newsletter for July. You know, the final brush over and corrections. Try to get additional information in the last minute. The newsletter will be send to approximately 1.000 receivers in the weekend.

I'm announcing release of the Danish version of OpenOffice.org 2.2.1. This time we are far behind schedule, because of several unfortunate things. First the QA was late. Bad luck, but that wasn't enough. When we wanted to upload to dotsrc, where the Danish versions are stored, we couldn't connect because of some problems on the Danish server. We can still see some slow performance once in a while. We will look into another solution soon because we can't live with this situation. We are trying to find out how the bouncer server works.

Lots of things are to be done in the summer period. Translation is in good progress: 69024 of 69336 strings are completely done and I think the last 300 strings will be translated and approved over the next couple of days. Nice to be finished with that. Thanks guys.

My travel to Barcelona in September is safe now. I managed to raise funds here in Denmark. Thanks to Symfoni Software and Sun Microsystems. Now I just need to prepare my presentation.

What should we call this ?

Some time ago I was criticized for using the expression Format war. I apologize if anyone was offended by that. I know that a lot of people actually live in parts of the world where war is a sad part of your lives. Sorry.

On the other hand, what's going on here in Denmark at the moment, more and more battles, fights and dirty discussions are going on. One of the Computer magazines made a short summary yesterday, claiming that Microsoft is about to win or at least that the battle is approximately equal. How can you measure if a discussion is being equal, when the outcome is still unknown ?

In the article is mentioned that Simon Phipps earlier said that it is understandable if the Parliament chooses dual standards. This, despite that Simon has made a very clear rejection of this interpretation of an earlier interview. The same article claims that the Danish UNIX User Group (DKUUG) is moving towards accepting dual standards. The user group has arranged a demonstration and comparison of the conversion tools, with representatives from both Microsoft and Sun. DKUUG is about to deny their support to dual standards. The presentation was a way to demonstrate how complicated things will be, if we implement dual standards. The article also gives credit to Microsoft for accepting ODF as a American National Standards Institutes (ANSI) standard. Yearh right ! Hi's the nice boy in the class, isn't he ? Prince Charming, we call him. As soon as the teacher turns his back, Microsoft will start teasing again. Taking things out of a context is one of the most popular arms.

Okay, I admit it. Microsoft is not the only one to throw mud. Sun, Novell and IBM can do pretty good as well.

Now the Danish IT-news has begun to make short summaries in English (e.g. http://www.computerworld.dk/art/39748 ). Funny development, because this has never happened before.

Call it a war, battle or fight. Call it what you like. I call it dirty and unnecessary.

Another mini conference next monday :-)

On monday, June 4th. there is another mini conference at Symbion. This arrangement is about plug-ins and converters. Arranged by DKUUG, SSLUG and KLID together with Microsoft and SUN Microsystems.

Time: Manday June 4th. 2007 14:00-18:00
Place: Symbion, Fruebjergvej 3, 2100 Kbh Ø. (see Map here)

Agenda:
14:00-14:30 Intro about ODF standard
Keld Simonsen, DKUUG, member of ISO SC34

14:30-15:15 Converter filter from SUN for Microsoft office incl. demo
Malte Timmermann, Technical Architect for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, Sun Hamburg

15:30-15:45 Mirosofts intentions with the ODF standard
Jasper Hedegaard Bojsen, Government Strategy Manager, Microsoft Danmark

15:45-16:00 Pause, coffee and cake

16:00-16:45 ODF converter - implementation and demo
Wolfgang Keber, Senior consultant, Dialogika, Tyskland

16:45-17:15 Testresults ODF converter
Axel Bojer, leader of the Norwegian OpenOffice.org translation group

17:15-17:30 Questions, summary and closing words
Keld Simonsen