Teaching software - one screencast at a time

150 Open Office help topics with screencasts

2007-06-06T09:01:00.000-04:00

Plan-B for OpenOffice.org celebrates fast expansion of its help topics supported by screencasts.

Within the last two weeks, we were able to grow the number of screencasts by 50%. Most new screencasts deal with paragraph formatting.

Some of the new additions to OOo writer documentation are:

Define space above paragraphs

Define space below paragraphs

Keep lines together in a paragraph or keep paragraphs together on a page

Also control orphan paragraphs and widow paragraphs

If you like fancy document formatting then you need to check out how to create drop cap letters at the beginning of a paragraph.

Plan-B grows to 100+ screencasts

2007-05-24T13:04:00.000-04:00

Read on our new blog location:

* Plan-B for OpenOffice.org grows to 100+ screencasts; progress for non technical users.
* Save the forrest, how big the MS OOXML spec really is.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

2007-03-30T07:27:00.000-04:00

Read the story at this blog's new home.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Good bye Blogger, Welcome Wordpress

2007-03-14T16:13:00.000-04:00

I have struggled for a few month to post here. It happened after I moved to the new Blogger. It insisted that my URL's included invalid characters. Which really could not be, as I did copy them straight from the browser.

This inability to post cause a gap in my blogging journey while I had to set up the blog to continue from here.

So please be my guest and follow me to the new site. You can also pick up the RSS for the Plan-B for Software Documentation Blog.

Coffee with Michael - "Authentic Voice"

2007-01-26T18:40:00.000-05:00

I just received a nice New Year's surprise gift (I'm still struggling with writing '07 dates).

Michael Katz, a local e-newsletter marketing consultant, just published the recording of his audio seminar - "FINDING (AND USING) YOUR AUTHENTIC VOICE". He usually sells his recordings, but decided to make it a free download this month.

Michael has a really authentic voice in e-newsletter marketing and he teaches his clients to be themselves in their writing. He has started a series of "Coffee with Michael". This month he invited Lissa Bergin-Boles, a life coach from Toronto. I trust him to know something about this topic.

If you got 20 minutes and are interested in finding your authentic voice and using it in newsletters, articles or blogs, listen in.

Need Fuzzi Math?

2007-01-23T09:05:00.000-05:00

Are you in need of Fuzzy math. I do not mean the political rhetoric, but rather the mathematical concept of fuzzy logic and fuzzy math.

Now you can calculate with fuzzy math in OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheets, thanks to the new InrecoLAN FuzzyMath component.

The component allows to use uncertain or approximate values in OpenOffice.org Calc. It means you can perform ordinary arithmetic operations and use ordinary mathematical and financial functions with uncertain values as if they are standard, or crisp, numbers. The component allows you to create and edit fuzzy numbers, use fuzzy numbers in formulas. You can also display the graphs from the fuzzy numbers and results of calculations.

Fuzzy math has strong mathematical basis. This component enhances all mathematical and financial OpenOffice.org Calc functions for which fuzziness might be reasonable.

InrecoLAN FuzzyMath is distributed under GNU General Public Licese (GPL). Source code and the newest versions of the component are available at SourceForge.

Learn more about it at www.openfuzzymath.org.

New OpenOffice.org tutorials

2007-01-16T14:09:00.000-05:00

ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn points to new tutorials for OpenOffice.org by InPics.

While the tutorials are basic they are certainly helpful. Interesting is that Dana reports these have been made available with funding from the US Department of Education.

OpenOffice.org releases 2.1.0, includes presentation mode for Impress

2006-12-20T15:13:00.000-05:00

OpenOffice.org got me an early Christmas present this year. They released version 2.1.0 and included the feature I wanted most, presentation mode in Impress. Some call it multi monitor support for Impress, either way it is most practical for giving a presentation. It allows you to use your laptop and show on the external monitor, or projector, the slides, while you can see on your screen the slides plus your own notes and more. Thank You Santa, eh OpenOffice.org team!

Before I forget, OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 also includes the following:

Improved HTML export in OpenOffice.org Calc
Enhanced Microsoft Access® support for OpenOffice.org Base
Even more supported languages
Automatic notification of available updates
More extensions

Drawing Shapes for OpenOffice.org

2006-12-04T11:15:00.000-05:00

Do you need some drawing templates for OpenOffice.org Draw or Impress? I found this small but growing collection by Mark Lautman. Mark has created collections for Computer and Network Symbols, Home Entertainment, Office Layout, Furniture and more.

Mark's Drawings are easy to use. Just download the documents he offers and click on a shape, copy, paste and use it as you need. These come in handy if you are illustrating your Impress presentation.

Way to go Mark.

Office collaboration server O3Spaces

2006-11-22T16:50:00.000-05:00

Dutch firm O3Spaces B.V. of a program that lets OpenOffice and StarOffice users collaborate on office documents. O3Spaces is fully integrated in OpenOffice.org, so users do not need to leave OpenOffice to perform most functions. This is equivalent to MS SharePoint for MS Office.

O3Spaces is a cross platform collaboration server with integration in the desktop, OpenOffice.org and a browser interface. In this environment a team stores their documents, if ODF or MS Office format, on a central server and creates versions with every change saved. users can receive notifications if any document they have in their workspace changes.

With O3spaces users can share documents on different OS platforms, such as Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. In addition the server provides shared calendars for scheduling meetings. A workflow engine can route documents to different users for review or approval.

All documents are secured by access rights so only authorized users can access them. The user management can be integrated with any LDAP server.

The version for self installation, the professional edition, costs 295 Euros (~ $375) , for five-users. A 100-user license costs 5,900 Euros (~ $7,600). O3Spaces is also available as an on-demand version or hosted application service.

Plan-B for OpenOffice.org - support for non-technical users

2006-11-21T17:39:00.000-05:00

On November 14th, Conficio (my company) released "Plan-B for OpenOffice.org" a support website for non-technical users. The release is a public beta test and a major milestone in our work.

In our press release titled "Plan-B™ for OpenOffice.org - The innovative support service for non-technichal users - starts public beta test" we write:

Plan-B™ for OpenOffice.org is the first website that creates a comprehensive documentation of the application suite based on visual instructions. Kaj Kandler, founder of Conficio, is convinced "Non-technical users learn better with visual instructions like short videos." He says, "We are very excited to offer this new technology to the fast growing user base of OpenOffice.org, the free open source office suite. Plan-B™ for OpenOffice.org especially benefits users who migrate from other office suites." This service, with its easy to understand help topics, supports the on demand needs of users at all levels of expertise.

I'd like to encourage all my readers to check out this new service. I'd appreciate if you would leave a comment on this blog or send me a message through the feedback on every page that contains a screencast.

Expect me to explain the various features and benefits in the next few weeks on this blog.

And by all means, register at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org if you find the service helpful.

IDC, launches OpenOffice.org survey

2006-11-17T08:42:00.000-05:00

IDC and OpenOffice.org have launched a survey to better understand the usage of Openoffice.org (now closed). IDC is a leading IT market analysis firm. This survey will analyze who is using the Openoffice.org suite and how.

IDC and OpenOffice.org will share the results of the survey with the public 3 month after conclusion. I think the OpenOffice.org community will welcome the feedback and use it to define the future direction of the productivity suite.

To attract more participants, IDC enters everybody into a raffle of 5 x $100 prizes. I'd encourage all my readers to take the survey right now (It's too late, now).

And the Winner is - OpenOffice.org

2006-11-11T06:27:00.000-05:00

Linux Journal, has announced it 2006 Editors' choice awards. In three categories OpenOffice.org won the top choice.

OpenOpffice.org wins in the category office suite. "OpenOffice.org delivers just the right combination of openness, power and similarity to Microsoft Office that it provides the features and familiarity people want in an office suite without the drawbacks of proprietary document format or proprietary code." write the editors of Linux Journal. They also note it is by far the most popular office suite behind MS Office.

OpenOffice.org Calc wind the category spreadsheet. They write "if you're really serious about doing spreadsheet work, your best bet is with OpenOffice.org Calc." Honorable mention in this category goes to EIOffice and KSpread. Interestingly they don't mention neither Google nor other web based applications. Well they are probably not close enough to Linux.

The third category win goes to OpenOffice.org Impress as editors' choice of presentation software. They state that offering "that optimal balance of features, power and familiarity for those who want to migrate from Microsoft Office" did convince them to prefer it over KPresenter or the EIOffice presentation component.

The word processor choice went to AbiWord. Often a word processor is all one needs and AbiWord apparently does a good job in that. LinuxJounal mentions that "AbiWord has all of what most people will need in a word processor and then some, without the bloat and long load times of OpenOffice.org Writer". As LinuxJournal reviewd version 2.0.3, this category might change next year, as version OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 has much improved load times.

Congratulations to OpenOffice.org and the development team. I think these awards are well deserved.

Writing sheet music with OpenOffice.org

2006-11-04T13:43:00.000-05:00

Are you a musician or a music teacher? Do you have the need to write some sheet music? why not use OpenOffice.org?

Did you know there is a simplified notation for music, called LilyPond. It is a simple system to describe the notes and also a program to typeset the notes as sheet music. Thanks to Dave Philips from LinuxJournal I now know how to write sheet music with OpenOffice.org.

Dave demonstrates the use of Samual Hartman's open source project OOoLilyPond.
Sam's project is a set of macros that integrate LilyPond into OpenOffice.org and is tested with OOo 2.0.2 and 2.0.4.

Thanks Dave and Sam!

All or Nothing with Vista?

2006-11-04T10:38:00.000-05:00

I just received a nice message from Intuit about "Decisions ahead on Vista Operating System". It states "Only QuickBooks 2007 will run on the Vista Operating System, as prior versions of QuickBooks were developed on pre-Vista technology and will not run properly on Vista."

That is rather surprising to me for two reasons. Isn't Microsoft the save bet that invests heavily in backward compatibility? Did Microsoft abandon this principle with Vista? The other reason is that using QuickBooks means I get constant updates. This is even true with my version that is a couple of years old now. So if Microsoft usually does preserve backward compatibility and Intuit has the software update process refined. What can be the reason for only a new version running on a new Version of Windows?

As a matter of fact they are serious that you need to upgrade "We know as a practical matter that many of you are supporting clients on previous versions of QuickBooks. For now the bottom line is that a user who upgrades to Vista will need to run QuickBooks 2007."

From where I stand this is a reason to not upgrade to Vista and may be buy my next PC without it all together. I'm also thinking hard about locking myself to Intuit's fine products if they are forcing me to upgrade because I upgrade something else.

Do you find this acceptable?

OpenOffice.org in Colleges and Universities

2006-10-26T11:46:00.000-04:00

OpenOffice.org is a popular office suite. As it is open source and available for free it is very attractive to institutions that want to save some money. This is especially true for institutions of higher education, that also want to save some money for students.

How popular is OpenOffice.org at the nations colleges and universities? That question has been researched by Benjamin Horst a NY based open source advocate. If your college uses OpenOffice and it is not on the list, drop Ben a comment.

Also, Digg this story so more people read about it and we get an even better list.

OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 released

2006-10-13T15:35:00.000-04:00

Highly anticipated, the next minor release of OpenOffice.org is out officially today. You can download release 2.0.4 here.

It is mostly a bug fix release. However it brings support for several new local data such as Namibian Afrikaans, Tigrigina Eritrea, Amharic Ethiopia, Tajik Tajikistan, Kirghiz, and Farsi Iran. OpenOffice.org is now capable to format locale dependent information such as date and time in these languages.

Release 2.0.4 improves the integration with KDE, using now system wide parameters correctly. Apple OS X users will like the better integration of native fonts into applications.

Calc became a function "INFO" that allows to ask for system data and makes spreadsheets more compatible with Microsoft Excel. An improve HTML import makes is more likely for Calc to read HTML formatted tables correctly.

Impress got a new feature to save shapes as images directly from the context menu.

OpenOffice.org can now also import LaTeX formatted files. Also this release lays the ground work for OpenOffice.org extensions to be come popular and easier to manage.

And last but not least, OpenOffice.org release 2.0.4 is supposed to be wicked fast at start up.

I'll report on my experience after I have used the new release a few days.

Speed is essential for OpenOffice.org

2006-10-12T21:55:00.000-04:00

Apparently speed is a major concern for the development team of OpenOffice.org. They were not satisfied with the time it takes to load large spreadsheets from Excel into OpenOffice.org Calc. So they improved Calc to load large spreadsheets faster by a factor of 15+.

When they say large spreadsheet, they mean really large, 25 megabytes, 100 sheets, 1 million cells and hundred thousand formulas. A change in the algorithm used brought down the times from ~39 minutes to 2:37 on a 1.8 MHz Pentium IV. On a Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 275 with more memory, the time reduced from ~28 minutes to 43 seconds, almost a gain of factor 40.

Unfortunately, the improvements will only be included in Release 2.1, targeted for end of the year. Hope for a nice Christmas present.

Danish study confirms saving with OpenOffice.org

2006-10-09T22:17:00.000-04:00

Switching to OpenOffice.org could save the Danish government $21 million over an upgrade to Office 2007. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by Ramboll Management an IT consultancy. The report was commissioned by the Danish Open Source Business Association.

The Danish Parliament decided on June 2 that starting 2008 all documents exchanged with its citizens must be based on open standard file formats. The report compares the two options of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007 with OpenXML and OpenOffice with the OpenDocument Format (also known as ISO 26300 standard).

The report looks at the cost over five years, including training and file conversion. The report concludes that on a strict cost basis, sticking with installed Offixe XP and Office 2003 and using a plug-in to load and save ODF documents would be the least expensive option. However, switching to OpenOffice, which uses ODF as its native file format, is little more costly. While upgrading to MS Office 2007 would cost additional $21 million.

Saving on Software in 2056

2006-10-09T21:52:00.000-04:00

Scott Carpenter published a rather sad satire about "5 ways to save on your monthly software rental bill in the year 2056".

Scott looks into the rear view mirror at current trends of monetizing software not with an up-front one time license but with a monthly or annual license fee. Well, as many of us know, commercial software does not really have a one-time fee anyhow. After a number of years the pressure to upgrade to the new version becomes so strong that there is no escaping. Did you know that Microsoft's assisted support for Outlook 98 ended on January 16, 2004. This is barely five years after inception and not atypical.

So enjoy Scott carpenter's satire and see the grain of truth he is conveying.

OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 late but in a hurry

2006-10-07T21:21:00.000-04:00

It appears the next minor release is a bit delayed. According to the roadmap the next minor release with bug fixes and smaller improvements was planned for September.

However, apparently release candidate 3 of the release does turn some heads with its improvements in speed. Some beta testers can't but rave about its quick startup time.

Sounds rather good to me. I can't wait.

The new chart module gets noticed

2006-10-06T21:38:00.000-04:00

I have recently reported on the new OpenOffice.org chart module and its improvements. Looks like Linux.com has also noticed the ongoing development of better charts for Calc. They have some nice screen shots of the chart preview, the ability to add regression curves, and the new flexible data ranges.

Unfortunately, they confirm the uncertain release schedule.

OpenOffice.org Template and Clipart Contest

2006-10-03T22:18:00.000-04:00

Worldlabel.com sponsors a contest for template and clipart held by the the Openoffice.org Documentation Project.

While OpenOffice.org (OOo) has reached a functional parity with the market leader in most categories that matter, it has not developed the wealth of templates for documents from faxes to letters, presentations and classic calculation projects such as business plans and budgets or travel expenses. It also lacks a great deal of creative clipart for newsletters and memos or simple product fliers.

The OOo documentation project has put the challenge to the many talented designers
and business people to share their creations. All entires must be licenses under Public Documentation License or LGPL. Entries must be posted to the documentation project by October 31st. Prizes of up to $750, sponsored by Worldlabel.com will be awarded for the best entries by December 1st.

See the contest home page for further details.

OpenOffice.org supports extensions like Firefox

2006-09-27T07:30:00.000-04:00

A major theme at the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2006) was the support for extensions. The OpenOffice developers envy the success of extensions in Firefox, NetBeans and Eclipse and want to replicate it.

OpenOffice has had for a long time a component architecture called Universal Network Objects (UNO). This architecture allows to mix components written in different languages, register them and allow each one to contribute to the overall functionality of the application. So far creation of such a component and its integration was a bit cumbersome.

The next minor release (2.0.4) will add common functionality, such as handling of license for extensions and the ability to install the extension for all or only for one user on a PC.

For the next major release (2.1) the development team introduces a new format that allows the components to be installed with one click, versioned and managed as extensions. It also will be possible to update extensions online and automatically search for updates. In addition extensions can require dependencies on other components. This will lead to a much more stable application and extension eco system.

OpenOffice.org 2.1 is planned for December 2006. I expect the first extensions to be out in Spring 2007. I look forward to such extensions. This move will set the bar lower for members of the community to add the single function they need and to contribute to the application as a whole. It also does work hand in hand with the contest for templates and clipart. This will make the OpenOffice.org suite more complete and more attractive to new users.

Next generation OOo Chart

2006-09-07T06:56:00.000-04:00

The OpenOffice.org development team is hard at work to make its office productivity suite better than ever.

Bruce Byfield reviews an OpenOffice.org milestone release and particularly its charting component. Although the component is not yet scheduled for any release date, Bruce does describe in detail the many changes and enhancements of the chart wizard for OpenOffice.org Calc. I guess it will be far into 2007 before we see the fruits of this work.

OpenOffice.org native Mac OS X port released soon.

2006-08-31T08:23:00.000-04:00

A french lead team works feverishly on porting OpenOffice.org natively to Mac OS X. Don't get me wrong, OpenOffice.org runs already on Mac OS X. However, the current port does require X Windows. This means the software does not look like an OS X application and it requires an extra package to be installed. These are extra hurdles to overcome and might prevent new users from trying out OpenOffice.org. One solution so far was NeoOffice, an effort to integrate OpenOffice.org more closely with OS X.

It appears another team is working towards the same goal right in the original OpenOffice.org code base. They are ready to present their work at OpenOffice.org Conference 2006 (Lyon), September 11- 13 and Apple Expo (Paris), September 12 to 16.

Clever marketing and its impact

2006-08-24T09:57:00.000-04:00

"The New Marketing" blog has developed a great story starting with an advertisement campaign in Redmont, WA. The campaign for OpenOffice.org, run by Sun Microsystems in the local bus system, pokes some fun at Miscrsoft.

The best part is how the blog follows up a few days later with "Observations on being on BoingBoing.com and Digg.com". A great read of how the story was reported weeks earlier but did not get much attention. However, the new marketing's version did get picked up by BoingBoing and later by Digg.com and so generated a buzz of 30,000+ readers.

I love the fact that the authors did follow up with another story about dropping leavlets as a propaganda technique.

I sure learned something about successful blogging from the folks at the new marketing blog.

On-demand streaming for OpenOffice.org?

2006-08-19T16:07:00.000-04:00

I just found Appstream.com a web service that claims to make upgrading software easier by delivering only the differences between versions. They do support OpenOffice.org and I wonder if any of my readers has ever used this service? Does it work? How timely are the updates?

Please comment or let me know kajkandler *at* conficio.com.

XML metrics for ODF and MSOOXML

2006-08-18T20:13:00.000-04:00

Rick Jelliffe, from O'Reilley, writes today about "Comparing XML office document formats: using XML Metrics".

He used a large document, the ODF 1.0 specification, (~735 pages) with tables and images and converted it into various formats for OpenDocument Format (ODF) using OpenOffice.org 2.0 and MS Office Open XML (MSOOXML) using MS Office 2007 beta. Then he used tools to measure the XML complexity with various metrics. This makes an interesting read for people who are interested in the debate of the two office document formats or are simply interested in the value of XML metrics.

Rick concludes:

The numbers seem to support the interpretation that beta MSOOX may be quite a bit less complex than ODF 1.1 at this stage, at least in the sense of using fixed structures more, and simpler in these sense of using fewer elements and attributes. ODF is flatter and has smaller filesize but seems to include more style headers than the MOOX does. The metrics indicate that the use of attributes may be significantly different between the two formats, for example for people looking at data conversion estimation. On the application level, Open Office loads the ODT file much faster than the Word 2007 beta loads the DOCX file.

A quick warning. Rick admittedly compares against a beta version of MS Office 2007. He states that "it seems possible that the Word 2007 beta saves a lot of information in bin64 encoded form that ODF exposes as attribute values." and that this might be of temporary nature "while the thing [MS Office 2007 and the MSOOOXML] is under development."

In any case a story I'll follow up with.

Creative marketing at its best

2006-08-16T23:26:00.000-04:00

Some folks at Mozilla had an idea to show their love for Mozilla Firefox, the free and open source web browser that keeps gaining market share.

They discussed the idea with others at OSCON06 and found collaborators in the Oregon State University Linux User Group. The idea was to create a crop circle for the Firefox logo.

The execution is awesome. Congratulations for showing creativity and stamina to make this beautiful work of art.

Microsoft strips Office for Mac

2006-08-09T09:16:00.000-04:00

eWeek reports about Microsoft's plans for the next version of Office for Mac. They will ditch support for Visual Basic macros in favor of AppleScript and and automator integration.

Does this open an opportunity for OpenOffice.org (and its OS-X cousin NeoOffice) to become the true enterprise office suite that ensures macro compatibility across Windows, Linux and OS-X?

OpenOffice.org deployment declined in UK higher education

2006-08-04T15:11:00.000-04:00

According to a survey by OSS watch, the use of OpenOffice.org in UK's higher education declined from 2003 to 2006. While an increasing number of institutions has an Open Source Software (OSS) policy, the deployment of OpenOffice.org declined from 38% to 23% and in further education from 24% to 23% (Table 26 following).

Not the best result OOo and also kind of surprising. However, one should keep in mind that "The survey was completed by more people: in 2003, ... only 6% of UK HE and FE institutions; in 2006, a reply from 18% of institutions was obtained. Whenever possible, comparisons have been made with the results of the 2003 survey. However caution has to be adopted in doing this since the roles and responsibilities of those who answered the 2003 survey are not equivalent."

The overall use of Open Source Software has increased and most ICT managers name total cost of ownership as a main reason. For 73% is the aspect of vendor lock in an important decision criteria.

Scott Mattocks on PHP-GTK

2006-08-04T08:26:00.000-04:00

I attended yesterday the Boston PHP Meetup (User Group) meeting for August.

Scott Mattocks introduced the basic concepts of PHP-GTK 2. He gave a well researched sample application using PHP and the Gimp Toolkit (GTK). The application queried an online database of events. His presentation went from from an empty window to the mostly functioning application with query form and result page.

Following his presentation we had a lively discussion about features such as long running tasks and complex widgets. Scott also assessed the learning curve as being a bit steeper than HTML forms but not as steep as Swing for example.

Finally we wondered "When would you use this kind of interface instead of plain server logic and HTML in a browser?" We figured that applications with sophisticated interaction patterns or requiring access to local data/databases would be best suited for PHP applications with an GTK interface. The caveat appears to be that there is limitations in deployment. The currently best method is deploying PHP, the libraries and the GTK one at a time. An alternative is emerging in Gnope, the PHP application installer.

Some lucky dudes took home Scott Mattocks book "Pro PHP-GTK" and T-Shirts. also many thanks to Optaros for hosting.

ODF Virtual File System?

2006-08-02T18:29:00.000-04:00

Erwin Tenhumberg writes about "Alfresco's ODF Virtual File System". This is part of the Open Source Alfresco Content Management system.

This virtual file system offers a drive in Microsoft Windows that if you drop a file, it will add it to the content management system and also convert it automatically to ODF.

This is the power of open standards at work!

Screencast with advertising is an old hat

2006-08-02T17:54:00.000-04:00

Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion and Matt McAlister comment today on screencasting with advertising. They refer to Infoworld's new series of screencasts, where they now add an advertisement trailer.

Just in case, Infoworld intends to patent this one, I claim prior art since 2003.

See http://www.conficio.com/ (wayback machine)

I did not make this for money reasons nor did I use arbitrary ads. I simply used it to make the time required to load the screencast more entertaining and to benefit the sponsor (or buyer) of the screencast.

Extremadura, Spain goes Open Source

2006-08-02T17:26:00.000-04:00

Techworld writes "The Spanish region of Extremadura has gone open source, deciding to move its entire administratrion to Linux and open source software within a year."

The region of Extramandura decided in 2002 not to upgrade its school computers with the latest Microsoft version. Instead they moved to a Spanish Linux distribution based on Debian. This saved the poorest region of Spain a chunk of money (70,000 desktops with Linux and OpenOffice.org as productivity suite).

Now the administration has decided to do the same for their IT needs. They stress that the freedom represented by OpenOffice and OpenDocument Format (ODF) are vital to their decision. "Vázquez de Miguel said the move was expected to make Extremadura's government less exposed to forced upgrades, and would make public documents easier to preserve and more easily accessible by the public."

One can only conclude they were satisfied with the functionality and the total cost of ownership.

The Ten Best Web Support Sites of 2006

2006-08-02T17:03:00.000-04:00

This years winners of the "Best Web Support Sites 2006" are

OPEN DIVISION

Dell
HP CPO
Juniper
Lucent
McAfee
Microsoft
Reuters
RM

SMALL COMPANY DIVISION

Made2Manage
think3

The contest is held annually by The Association of Support Professionals (ASP), through a survey among their members. It is quite remarkable how the list changes from year to year.

The ASP also added two new companies, Microsoft and think3, to the Hall of Fame of support web sites for making the ten best four times.

Congratulations to the winners!

Google offers search for the blind

2006-07-27T18:13:00.000-04:00

Google has a new lab project "Google Accessible Search" which ranks the results for ease of accessibility.

This new service (currently on Google Labs) adds a small twist to Google web search: in addition to finding the most relevant results from Google as usual, Accessible Search further prioritizes results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. When you search from the Accessible site, you'll get results that are prioritized based on their usability. This tends to favor pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op's technology, which emphasizes search results based on specialized interests. (from Friends of Google newsletter)

Search for "tutorials" on Google (regular) and you find 468 millions of results and on top are some that are reach in graphics. The first item is Section 508 compliant. However, the second item, Sun's Java tutorials violates this important accessibility test.

Search for "tutorials" on Accessible Search and you'll find a different set of supposedly clear cut text based websites with no or little images. In my test this is not to obvious. Number one, the University at Albany, has only a header image. However number two, CProgramming.com, does create pop-ups, is quite image rich and fails the Section 508 test as well.

I'm not sure if this is so helpful for blind people or those with other impairments.

French central administration adopts OpenOffice.org

2006-07-26T15:54:00.000-04:00

The European commission reports on its eGovernment website that the central administration of France charges ahead in migrating 400,000 users to OpenOffice.org.

The administration created various tools, such as an installation CD, SCORM compliant training and migration guides as well as online support services.

This is the largest migration I have seen so far announced. The plan calls for finishing the migration in 2007.

Firefox extension for ODF

2006-07-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

There is a new ODFReader for Firefox available. This Firefox extension does read ODF text documents and is being developed by the OpenDocument Fellowship. The ODFReader is a companion of the ODFViewer, using the same XSLT style sheet to convert XML into (X)HTML.

Currently the ODFReader for Firefox does support Firefox 1.5.0.X and claims to be Firefox 2.0 ready.

ODF Viewer avaliable

2006-07-19T08:14:00.000-04:00

The OpenDocument Fellowship announced today the availability of an ODF Viewer.

This small application allows to view ODF documents even if no office suite supporting ODF is installed. For example, with this tool you can read ODF e-mail attachments or ODF documents download from the Internet without having installed OpenOffice.org or one of the other suites supporting ODF.

The application is currently in beta testing and does not yet support ODF 1.0 fully. I'd expect frequent updates. It is probably best recommended for power users or environments where it can be installed and updated by an IT department.

The ODF viewer is based on a XSLT style-sheet to transform XML to (X)HTML. The transformation infrastructure and the user interface are based on XUL and XULRunner.

OpenDocument (ODF) compatible with GPL

2006-07-15T15:05:00.000-04:00

Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has found the Open Document Format to be compatible with free software licensing, such as the General Public License (GPL) and the Apache License. SFLC wrote an "OpenDocument Opinion Letter" on behalf of the Apache Software Foundation and and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The letter is signed by the SFLC's legal council, Eben Mogley. The opinion concludes with the following findings.

Under the relevant OASIS patent policy, all Essential Claims held by OASIS Technical Committee Obligated Members are available to all implementors of ODF on terms compatible with free and open source software licenses.
Sun’s license terms for access to its Essential Claims are fully compatible with free and open source software licensing.
- Sun’s terms are compatible with contribution and licensing under the policies and license of the Apache Software Foundation.
- Sun’s terms are not in conflict with Section 7 of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License, and are not otherwise incompatible with the GPL.

This means that "Free Open Source Projects" can use the format. We can expect more OSS development teams to adopt the format and see more applications supporting it or like the Plone foundation using it in some other way. This is also another confirmation supporting the State of Massachusetts' decision to use it for longterm storage.

Striving for total innovation is bad business

2006-07-06T11:17:00.000-04:00

I found an interesting read that furthers the debate of "making new products to similar" which I have written about. The "Emergence Marketing" blog does summarize a very applicable article in the Harvard Business Review.

For a product like OpenOffice this would mean that closely resembling the market leader in functionality and user interface is actually beneficial and does increase the chances of adoption.

Talking about OpenOffice.org's compelling features

2006-07-05T22:35:00.000-04:00

In a Linux Journal article today, Nicholas Petreley writes that Linux Office suites need to gain more compelling features for people to switch. He argues Microsoft did win their customers not by emulating their established competition, but by offering certain advantages and making it still easy for them to switch.

I'm not sure if he is advocating for the Open Source/Free Software community to emulate the bad business practices of Microsoft in exploiting their virtual monopoly and driving competition out of business by undercutting their distribution channels?

One key to Microsoft Office's success was, the secret integration between Office and the OS (where MS had a very strong position). The other key was that they had a virtual monopoly on the distribution channel through pre-loading with new PCs. At the time MS strong armed PC manufacturers to bundle the OS and Office suites with every new PC. So from the standpoint of a new PC buyer it was "for free" and meant spending extra money to buy one or more packages and also to install them and support them separately. So convenience and monopolistic tactics won over features and compatibility. By the way, the office suite idea was novel at the time as well and best executed by MS, just to give them credit.

I don't think that a single convenience feature such as "strong" links would win me over from one proprietary package to another (i.e. EIOffcie, as Nicholas Petreley suggests). That said, OpenOffice.org has already the compelling feature that makes it superior to MS Office. It is the support for Open Document Format (ODF) or ISO 26300.

Not everybody might yet have realized it, but not only the State of Massachusetts has a problem with long term storage of electronic documents that are so prevalent today in an office environment. You can't read a 20 year old Wordstar document these days (even if the storage media, i.e.tape, is perfectly readable). I know because my master theses and a couple of my publications are in that format. Non of the current packages does fully support it.

The seemingly obvious does not work. You can't keep the old packages around, because they won't install on the new OS (16 bit --> 32 bit --> 64 bit --> ...). You can't keep the old OS around, because it won't install on the new hardware (see above). By the way, the old software won't play well with the new printer either. And building a virtual museum of old technology artifacts that even has to work just in case someone needs access to an older document is not the direction we want to go anyway. We want new and old documents accessible through the Internet and quickly.

According to the State of Massachusetts, only an open and free (as in speech) document format can guarantee long into the future that you have access to your actual document. It must be open and documented, so anybody can write a program against it. It must also be free so nobody can prevent you from doing so, just because they want to leverage certain monopoly effects or stifle a particular competition.

OpenOffice.org (OOo) uses ODF as its default format and is the package with the largest installed base for supporting this format. It certainly is not a short term convenience feature, but it will com in handy if you want to review your high school writings from your arm chair in retirement. And it sure is essential if your grandson wants to research the title to his grandfathers goldmine in the archives of the State of Massachusetts.

Certainly, OOo is not a product that can leverage monopolies nor has it to, in order to undercut the price of the competition. And as free (as in speech) software anybody can always do something about the missing killer feature, implement it or organize funding for its implementation. You say that is so hard? Look at what a couple of guys do with NeoOffice to get the support and integration they want for Mac OS X.

Take a Test Drive - Keep the Car!

2006-06-30T17:12:00.000-04:00

OpenOffice.org continues its line of competitive advertisements. The marketing project unveiled a new campaign that capitalizes on the market leader's delays with its upcoming release Office 2007.

"Take a Test Drive - Keep the Car!" hints that you can test drive and keep OpenOffice.org for free. While Microsoft invited potential users for an online test drive of its beta 2 pre-release in which saving and printing is disabled, OpenOffice.org aims at customers to download the latest release 2.0.3 and install the full version. The catch, upcoming Office 2007 will pinch testers who like in the wallet once it is available. In contrast OpenOffice.org is free and open source.

In addition, Office 2007 will have many user interface changes which frightens many users because they have to relearn their skills. Another point of critic is that Microsoft does not support the new ISO 26300 office document standard and is still haggling with Adobe over the support of PDF files.

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 released

2006-06-30T07:11:00.000-04:00

The latest version of OpenOffice.org, faster and more secure than ever.

New and improved in release 2.0.3:

Better performance: for example, a 23 percent speed increase in certain Calc operations.
Microsoft Office file compatibility further improved.
New email integration with support for Microsoft email file formats.
Improved export of PDF documents and how they will display when opened in a PDF reader.
Increased accessibility features.
Even more languages supported.
Improvements in hyphenation and thesaurus for many languages.
Automatic check for updated versions.
Support for Intel architecture for Mac OS X.
Improved Mac OS X font integration.

see the release notes for more details.

Interest in the latest update must be huge. The servers of OpenOffice.org seems slow today.

Printing POSTNET barcode on envelopes

2006-06-28T09:33:00.000-04:00

Just found a great expert tip from Michael Santos.

"OpenOffice envelopes with Postal Service bar code"

Michael, did take some manual instructions from Solveig Haugland on "Printing Envelopes in OpenOffice.org 2.0" and wrote a macro to automate the calculation of the barcode checksum. You can download a sample envelope including the macro from his blog.

Answers to many questions about blogging and its jargon

2006-06-27T15:18:00.000-04:00

Tens days ago I held a talk about blogs and forums as business and marketing tools at the Network@TheLibrary in Winchester, MA. Today I discovered the "A-Z of Professional Blogging", a list that answers many questions my audience had.

It includes from A like "AdSense" the Google advertisement program used by many blogger s to defray some of the costs, to "Zoudry" a blog editor, all you wanted to know about blogging.

Don't be afraid, it is not only for professional bloggers. The list helps especially those that want to learn a bit more about blogging or have started already.

The New BlogBridge:Library

2006-06-27T14:55:00.000-04:00

I participated this morning in a skypecast about BlogBridge:Library, the newest product in the BlogBridge family.

BlogBridge:Library is a portal to pre-select authoritative blogs for a specific community. If you know BlogBridge, you are familiar with its ability to create and publish guides and to rate blogs as well as participating in the social network rating process of those blogs.

If I understand this new product correctly, it is the web-portal equivalent of BlogBridge with two important extensions:

The web version has registered users with different profiles. Depending on your profile you are authorized to create and manage guides or to manage the blogs within one guide.
BlogBridge:Library can be the private social sharing server behind BlogBridge clients deployed within an organization, such as a company or a non-profit organization.

I'm personally still new to BlogBridge and have not yet figured fully out what its advantages is over other feed readers. However I can see the potential of pre-packaged blogs that meet certain quality standards. In ways this could be the modern form of a news papers editorial staff collecting trustworthy sources so I can read quality news and comments and skip the junk.

My first Skypecast

2006-06-22T14:54:00.000-04:00

This morning I participated to my very first skypecast. Skyepcast is a new feature of Skype the VOIP company recently bought by EBay. A skypecast allows to give of live talk over the Internet, using VOIP. It also offers the possibility for listeners to to participate in a conversation.

I was a mere participant of a skypecast by PitoSalas about "BlogBridge:Library". Pito faired quite well considering the glitches this beta product still has. I found out about the event through an announecment on Pito's blog. I followed the link to a page on Skype's website, where the basics of the event where listed.

When it was time to join the skypecast I clicked on a button on that page and my Skype was started. I got a bit confused, when the application asked me if I wanted to connect to an +99..... number via SkypeOut. I was not sure if this was a way to run up a hefty bill with Skype, but I figured my balance on SkypeOut was a mere few dollars and I could risk these.

A new window opened and in a few minutes half a dozen people had gathered. However, the host was still missing so we did not hear each other. Once Pito had logged on, we were all connected in a voice conference. This lead to lots of audio feedback and a very noisy environment. Thankfully, Pito as presenter was able to mute all microphones of the participants and so we could actually hear what he had to say.

Pito talked about their new product BlogBridge:Library (more...) and guided us through a demo on their website. Using voice broadcasting only, pito had to talk us through his demo. Adding Skype Instant Messaging (IM) capabilities helped to facilitate questions to the presenter. However, we didn't manage to all be part of one IM session, so that the burden fell on the presenter to read many windows and post his link into all of them. I imagine this will become unmanageable when the number of participants exceeds 10 or 20.

A few minutes into the skypecast an new participant joined and rather loudly commented on what Pito was presenting. I guess she didn't realize that we all could hear her. It appeared that the new participant came in at the default setting "open mike", which was not intended by the presenter at this point in time. I guess this is a bug in the skypecast software.

In my experience, skypecast has to iron out some kinks in its beta version and give some better instructions and training how to use this new product. As medium skypecasting is quite limited compared to full fledged web-conferences, for example from BostonConferencing.com.

OpenOffice.org activist takes a page out of Firefox' book

2006-06-20T07:34:00.000-04:00

Ben Horst and a group of OpenOffice.org activists has started a fund raising campaign to raise awareness for the open source office suite Their plan is to place full page advertisements in New York's Metro newspaper. The concept has been pioneered by the Spread Firefox campaign in 2005 when the open source community raised the substantial funds required to place a double page ad in the New York Times.

The Spread Firefox campaign raised awareness for the launch of Firefox 1.0. The campaign to place an ad in the NY Times became news in itself, because it seemed so outrages. The fund raising was so successful, that a double sided ad appeared in the NY Times with the names of thousands of donors.

Ben Horst, a long-time activist for OpenOffice.org takes it on him self to organize the effort. He set up a project at Fundable.org to raise $10,000 for two full page advertisements in NY Metro. New York's Metro is a free newspaper that is distributed to 330,000 people every day and read by 450,000 readers. The goal of Ben's efforts is to raise awareness that there is an easy to use, free and guaranteed legal alternative to high priced office productivity suites.

In addition to raising the funds, Ben Horst runs also a grassroots discussion group and a competition to design the full page advertisement. This is a real grass roots effort that should help to put OpenOffice.org in the minds of people outside of the geek community.

If you'd like to contribute, please hurry. Ben's goal is to place the ads in the first week of July.

Using Blogs and Forums to Generate Interest in Your Business

2006-06-12T13:12:00.000-04:00

Presentation at Network@TheLibrary Winchester, MA

Kaj Kandler, the founder of Conficio will present in June at the Network@TheLibrary in Winchester, MA. His topic will be "Using the Web to Generate Interest in Your Business: Part II, Blogs and Forums"

"Using the Web to Generate Interest in Your Business: Part II, Blogs and Forums"

Time: Tuesday, June 20th 2006, 10 - 11:30 a.m.

Location: Winchester Library, 80 Washington Street, Winchester, MA.

Kaj Kandler, founder of Conficio, will focus on how entrepreneurs and small businesses can use the Internet effectively to promote their business. In this follow-up to his November session, Kaj will talk about how to use blogs and forums to generate interest in your business. (You don't need to have attended his previous session or have advanced computer knowledge to benefit from this presentation.)

Network @ The Library is open to all, especially entrepreneurs, consultants and others who are self-employed, providing them with an opportunity to meet others like themselves, talk about common problems, and learn about solutions and resources. For more information, visit http://www.winpublib.org/network.htm call the Reference Desk at 781-721-7171 ext. 20, or e-mail Janet Nelson at jnelson@minlib.net

Conficio publishes software manuals based on screencasts. Conficio's Animated software manuals enhance training and support for non-expert PC users. Conficio uses screencasts to demonstrat functionality instead of describing it with words. For more information see Conficio's website.

OpenDocumentFormat gets official MIME-types

2006-06-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

Eike Rathke reports that IANA registered officially the MIME-types for OpenDocumentFormat

Time to update Firefox and Apache HTTP server, so they can interpret ODF documents and the new ISO/IEC 26300 document mime-types correctly.

OpenLaszlo for AJAX is coming soon.

2006-06-09T11:17:00.000-04:00

Yesterday evening, I listened to a remarkable presentation from David Temkin from LaszloSystems. David presented the upcoming release of OpenLaszlo "Legals" (will be released as 4.0) which supports the rendering of OpenLaszlo applications in DHTML and Flash.

OpenLaszlo is a really remarkable framework. To achieve such sleek user interfaces they use "cinematic experience". this kind of eye candy that is unheard of in the web-application world. OpenLaszlo claims it allows a user to better understand the transitions from one state of an application to the next and therefore makes navigation easier to understand. and delivers near desktop performance to a web-browser near you.

David showed some real world applications such as web-based Gliffy a Visio like diagram drawing application and Pandora, a personalized web-radio that plays to your individual taste, if you train it well. He also demonstrated a sleek application for Barclays Global Investors tracking stock indeces which LaszloSystems did create in 2 weeks.

However, a really great application is their LZPIX Photo Application. It's an application that pulls some photos from Flickr and displays them in a Laszlo based interface. It is making use of almost every thing in the LZX language. The remarkable part is that the same source code can be rendered in Flash and in the new DHTML engine. And it is extraordinary, that in parts the DHTML version is even faster than the Flash version. Look at the speed in which the images load in DHTML vs. Flash. This is quite an achievement for the development team of OpenLaszlo.

Amy Muntz delivered a convincing plea for open source contributions to the OpenLaszlo project. If you are a designer or programmer and want to show off a really cool application or component. This is the place to go. and off course you can also contribute to the overall development of the engine.

The only disappointment for me was that I didn't hear a story, how to get this great platform to the desktop. It looks like Adobe is going to deliver Flash based applications to the desktop with the Apollo project. I think that is a great development, because many web-based applications do not need the browser to function, look at Pandora or the very own LaszloMail. They would be better off with loosing the browser back button and navigation bar and trade it in for some local storage. I hope that the upcoming Apollo will play OpenLaszlo Code in Flash as well as in DHTML.

The good news of the evening was that OpenLaszlo 4.0 will be released any week now.

I must conclude, that OpenLaszlo is really hot (70+ attendees are proof of that) and heads and shoulders above developing a Rich Internet Application (RIA) from scratch. Thanks to the folks at Optaros hosting this event.

Experience as a software usability tester

2006-06-05T10:50:00.000-04:00

Two weeks ago I read a post on a software contractor mailing list, seeking candidates for usability testing of a government related software. The company was local and there was a reasonable compensation promised but most of all I was curious to see how such things are done. So I responded with an e-mail.

Tony Brown from SoftPlex responded promptly with a short questionnaire to test if I was a match for the software they wanted to test. I answered the few questions and seemed to get to the next round with a couple of more questions. I made the cut and was invited to a session at Monday morning 8am in Boston Downtown.

I arrived ahead of time at the testing facility, where I met Tony Brown in person. I was led to a room with a long table and a laptop and a few video cameras. The room was also equipped with a huge one sided mirror, the kinds you know from police movies in the interrogation room. I was asked to sign a form, consenting with being watched and filmed for the purposes of the the study. Then I was introduced what I should test and that it was the usability of the software under scrutiny, not my ability to succeed or fail. I had to fulfill a sequence of tasks on a website, mostly finding information. I was asked to speak aloud my thoughts and reactions.

For about an hour I tried to fulfill task, mostly assume you are looking for information about subject A. Where would you look and let us know when you think you found it or gave up. The atmosphere was comfortable and I didn't feel intimidated by being watched. It was funny though to talk all you thoughts aloud.

After the session finished I asked Tony how many candidates he uses to make such a test. He replied that usually after 4 to 5 a pattern emerges that yields useful information. He said typical costs of such a usability study would be between $5,000 and $10,000 depending on the complexity of the questions and if one rents such a facility with the double sided mirror and cameras or does it at the clients premise with less equipment.

I can definitely say it was an interesting experience and I learned a bit about the value of usability testing. Based on my experience I'm heavily inclined to use his services, when the time is ripe to make my current project consumer ready.

Second day BarCamp Boston 2006

2006-06-05T10:48:00.000-04:00

Second day of BarCampBoston started out a bit slower. Many had not come back for a second day at least not very early. May be I missed some important sessions on the bar on the night before.

Today I enjoyed a very energetic session about "Powerful, Pointed Presentations". In essence cater to the emotions of your audience to get both halves of the listener's brain involved. Also, the obligatory slide-show print-out should be avoided and replaced by a text document presented after the oral presentation has finished.
It was also time to jump into the ring and educate fellow BarCampers about Open Document Format, why the State of Massachusetts did mandate it and what the role for OpenOffice.org is in this development. Unfortunately my session was at the same time as "Newbie on Rails", which did draw the bulk of the crowd.
More BarCampers were interested in the topic "Solving Spam by signing messages with PGP" which I offered. I have this idea in my head for more than two years and I wanted to here what other have to say about it. I think the basic issue with spam is the ability to falsify the sender. If all (or most) e-mail is signed with PGP, then everybody can filter on that signature (which can't be falsified) and so determine if that e-mail is important to him or not. Here are some of the arguments:

You create your own signature, and publish the public key. Your signature becomes more trustworthy through other people signing it with their signature.
One also needs to be aware that by signing some else signature I do not claim this person is not a spammer. I only authenticate that he is who he says he is in the signature. All I verify is her name and her e-mail address. But this gives any recipient the ability to forcefully filter on that identity.
If we get to the point that most e-mail is signed and I mostly care about e-mail signed by a someone I know already, then I would blacklist all unknown senders. This can be solved by prioritizing e-mail according to the trust level of the signature and the distance between me and the closest signer of the signature to be checked.
One member of the audience did say that e-mail lists would brake the signature by adding their own footer, such as Yahoo. However, they can either add the footer in a mime compliant way or resign the message with their own key.
Another member pointed to HushMail having implemented an interesting PGP signed web-mail trust. I got to check this out soon.
Many agreed the key to such a system is two-fold

We need a wide spread filter, preferably a spamassassin filter. This filter needs to verify the signature of the e-mail and then use the trust vote in the my key-ring to apply the filter I defined.
The second component would be E-Mail clients, such as Thunderbird, to come integrated with PGP and the ability to create or load a PGP key with every profile one creates.

I really enjoyed this BarCamp and look forward to the next one. Mike Walsh said planning is in progress for one in fall 2006.

I want to thank Monster for hosting us and the other sponsors for making it possible. If one thing I would improve for next time, it is a better scheduling system, that is available via the net. Especially in the Monster location, where the event was spread out between three disjunct locations this would be a great plus.

First day of BarCamp Boston 2006

2006-06-03T22:45:00.000-04:00

Finally http://barcamp.org/BarCampBoston is here. I had high hopes going to Maynard and I was not disappointed. The crowd was mainly 25+ and had a slant to the professional, rather than the geek with college credentials. However, the first day was a lot of fun.

The folks from Monster Inc. welcomed us and we started the day with a breakfast, studying the big scheduling wall and watch it change every ten minutes as new events were posted and others were moved around. A good start was the introduction round, where a microphone was passed around and everybody who wanted introduced him- or herself shortly. The elevator speeches were definitely professionally presented.

My first session around 11 am was called "From idea to realization", held be Sudha Jamthe. She told the story of her remarkable experience raising 1 Mio in 40 days in the heydays of the bubble and what she learned how the VC and Angel investor world works. She said she sees many hopeful entrepreneurs who are hopeful because the some VC told them "If you improve this function on your software we can fund you". She said in her experience this stage can last up to three years (with changing VCs in the process) and no successful funding. She said, you need to get at least one customer that buys the product to overcome this cycle. Her best advice was to not avoid the VCs but use their advice and do not pin your hope on the money. Sudha also said, the best advisers for a start-up are those former entrepreneurs that are back into some kind of corporate executive job. They are not focused on investing and money and they are not high paid professional advisers. But the miss the entrepreneurial spirit and if you can bring some of your enthusiasm to them it rewards them for helping you and sharing their wisdom with you. Off course your idea must catch fire in their mind. All around an excellent session.
Shimon Rura, gave a thought provoking session about better UI's. He applied some psychological insight to the topic. One that stuck in my head was give the user immediate reward. Every step must present some useful information. In other words avoid long navigations paths and query only forms. Instead list the most useful information right away and allow for further filtering or deeper navigation.
Another excellent brainstorming session was held by Andy Singleton from Assembla. He wanted to explore the vision of a Software reactor. His basic assumption was that all resources, like people, talent, QA, code, etc. are abundant and if qualified in the right way and given the right incentives one could build an awesome virtual software organization (a software reactor). The crowd wasn't really convinced that all resources are abundant and we tested this assumption quite a bit. I certainly had the feeling that Andy went home a step forward in his thought process of this issue (or should we call it a business model?).

All in all, the first day was shock full of great sessions and a multitude of one on one's.

OpenLaszlo with AJAX, June 8th in Boston

2006-06-02T09:13:00.000-04:00

Laszlo Systems invites the Boston developer community to an evening of pizza, beer and OpenLaszlo AJAX development on Thursday, June 8th. They will present a preview of the new DHTML runtime for the OpenLaszlo platform and have the chance to meet other Laszlo advocates. Please register or sign up to present your latest OpenLaszlo project.

Who Should Attend
OpenLaszlo (LZX) newbies and seasoned Laszlo veterans alike are welcome.

Where and When
Optaros
60 Canal Street, 4th Floor (Map)
Boston, MA 02114
Phone: (617) 227-1855

Cost: Free. Pizza, beer and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided by Laszlo Systems.

PHPMeetup Boston, June 2006

2006-06-02T07:53:00.000-04:00

June 1st was once again PHP Meetup Boston night. Mark Withington, the organizer had invited Mike Potter from Adobe's Developer Relations team to present about the upcoming Flex 2.0 web-application framework and how to use it with PHP back-end applications. Mike gave an impressive overview of Flex 2.0 and how easy it is to create impressive user interfaces with a few lines of xml and ActionScript.

Here is what I took away from this meeting:

Flex 2.0 is a really impressive development and expected to be out within the next 60 days. See for yourself, what Mike did with Flex2.0 and Drupal. He also demonstrated an open source PHP-Flex bridge, called AMFPHP. Flex 2.0 competes with open source projects such as OpenLaszlo and ZK1. However, Mike thinks it is the stronger platform. He said that a basic command line SDK will be free and the Flex 2.0 developer IDE based on Eclipse will be less than $1000 per developer license.

Mike described another project that

piqued

my interest. The project is called Adobe Apollo and is expected to come out by the end of the year. He described it as a stand alone flash application engine, that can be used to package Flash (and Flex) based applications to be installed on a user's desktop. The really cool statement to me was that it also should run AJAX based applications.

Mike also did a cool demo of 3D objects embedded in PDF documents and animated through JavaScript. He showed off an impressive 3D rendering of a turbine which he was able to pan and rotate as well as to have the turbine wheel spinning, while doing so. And all this in a 300K document you can e-mail and print (w/o the animation off course).

Triggered by a question from the audience, Mike briefly introduced Adobe's AJAX framework, called Spry. This also looks very powerful and I have to revisit this topic, once I learned a bit more about it.

This was an evening really well spent. I learned a lot and met a bunch of great people. If you are a PHP developer or a software developer in Boston, I highly recommend to go to the PHP Meetup.

Banco do Brasil has now 35,000 OpenOffice.org users

2006-05-30T22:12:00.000-04:00

In an article of today, TMCNet reports, that "Banco do Brasil has completed the migration of all its Windows XP computers to the OpenOffice.org open source suite"

They report that 35,000 PC have been converted from Windows XP to Linux with OpenOffice.org. This is a lot of PC's that now run the open source office suite. Banco do Brazil is federally owned and the Brazilian government has supported open source for quite a while. They are not only using it but actively making sure that translations are available in Portuguese as well as supporting open source development.

BarCamp Boston 2006

2006-05-19T15:51:00.000-04:00

On June 3 - 4 the Boston geek community will gather for the BarCamp Boston 2006. Thanks to Shimon Rura for driving the organizing effort. It promises to be an interesting event with presentations, lightning talks and demos. BarCamps are supposed to bring together geeks as well as entrepreneurs to talk ideas, trends and how to make them happen for the benefit of the greater public. In addition we'll have a hacking competition I look forward to. If you live in Greater Boston, you don't want to miss it. If only to tour the offices of Monster.com who sponsors the facilities.

Best Open Source Software for the Macintosh

2006-05-19T09:05:00.000-04:00

Apple Matters has selected OpenOffice.org as best open source software for the Macintosh in its category. Devanshu Mehta from Apple Matters sees it as an obvious choice, writing "This one is a no-brainer. Compared with the expensive office software from other companies, OpenOffice.org has a quite well-rounded feature set."

However, Devanshu thinks that the reliance on X11 for OpenOffice.org for OS X is a serious drawback and recommends NeoOffice, the port created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin using Cocoa for a native look and better integration.

New visual books

2006-05-13T11:25:00.000-04:00

InPictures has published four new books covering OpenOffice.org

InPictures follows an unusual concept: [Its] computer how-to books are based on pictures, not text. The company states Most computer books contain over 50,000 words. In Pictures books contain one-tenth as many.

Best of all, the books are cheap, dirt cheap For a limited time, In Pictures books can be downloaded for free.

Open Document format 1.0 becomes ISO approved

2006-05-10T15:10:00.000-04:00

In a joint press release, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved the international Standard ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.

The Open Document Format (ODF) has been developed as an application-independent format by a vendor-neutral OASIS Technical Committee. ODF has been at the heart of the controversy around the State of Massachusetts adopting open standards to ensure long-term readability of electronic documents.

FSF may take OpenOffice.org off its high priority list

2006-05-01T21:41:00.000-04:00

According to an article at NewsForge, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers removing OpenOffice.org from its high priority list of open source projects.

The FSF does maintain this list to draw attention to various projects it considers critical to achieve parity with proprietary platforms. FSF put OpenOffice.org on the list, despite that it is open source itself. However, it is based on Java and depends on features that are not available in the free Gnu implementation of Java.

With the recent release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 the goal has apparently been achieved to eliminate all the quirks, that prevented OpenOffice.org to compile on GCJ. One caveat, this build is not the fasted in the world and rather not usable. But the FSF claims the principle goal to be achieved and hopes that future GCJ implementations will take care of reasonable performance.

OpenOffice.org books covering the current version 2.0

2006-04-26T08:25:00.000-04:00

Finally I discovered a bunch of books about OpenOffice. org, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office that covering the current version (2.0):

Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 2.0, by the OOoAuthors.org a group of volunteer documentation writers.
Sams Teach Yourself OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows All in One by Greg Perry is the book for those that want to convert wholesale to open source products.
OpenOffice.org 2.x Resource Kit by Solveig Haugland and Floyd Jones. this book is scheduled for publishing on June 24. 2006. Solveig Haugland has also blog about her work with OpenOffice.org worth reading.
Point & Click OpenOffice.org by Robin Miller.
The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org by Benjamin Horst, a member of the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project
A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2.0 by R. Gabriel Gurley.
OpenOffice 2 by Mike Weber, published by spidertools.com focuses on Linux users.

OpenOffice.org books for special audiences

2006-04-25T14:15:00.000-04:00

Continuing my research regarding books on OpenOffice. org, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. I found a few today that Appeal to special audiences:

OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Want to Know About Switching OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office by Tamar E. Granor, Scott Carr, and Sam Hiser. The book covers OpenOffice.org version 1.1 from the perspective of users converting from MS Office.
OpenOffice.org Macros Explained by Andrew Pitonyak. The book is obviously for advanced users who want to automate functions for repeat use.
6x9 Book Template for OpenOffice.org Writer by Dmitri Popov is a template for a book for OOo-Writer.

OpenOffice.org books focusing on specific components

2006-04-24T13:24:00.000-04:00

Continuing my research of books on OpenOffice. org, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, I found a few books that focus on single programs of the suite:

OpenOffice Writer

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Writer Guide by the OOoAuthors.org, a volunteer group of documentation writers.
OpenOffice.org Writer : The Free Alternative to Microsoft Word by Jean Weber covers version 1.0 or 1.1. Jean Weber did write this book originally in self publishing and O'Reilley later decided to publish the book which gave it a wider audience.
Writer for Writers by Dmitri Popov

Books about OpenOffice.org

2006-04-21T17:07:00.000-04:00

I started some research on OpenOffice. org, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. I compiled a list of books, teaching the popular office suite. I thought I share my results online. First I found quite a view Covering older versions (1.0 and 1.1):

OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit by Solveig Haugland and Floyd Jones. This book has a successor "OpenOffice.org 2.x Resource Kit" announced for 24. June 2006
From the "For Dummies" series there is "OpenOffice.org for Dummies" from Gurdy Leete, Ellen Finkelstein, Mary Leete. The book covers OpenOffice 1.0 or 1.1 and needs updating to the current version of the free office suite.
Sams Teach Yourself OpenOffice.org All In One by Greg Perry and Kenyon Brown.
OpenOffice 1.3 published by spidertools.com

Using the Web to Generate Interest in Your Business

2005-11-02T13:27:00.000-05:00

Presentation at Network@TheLibrary Winchester, MA

Kaj Kandler, the founder of Conficio will present in November at the Network@TheLibrary in Winchester, MA. His topic will be "Using the Web to Generate Interest in Your Business"

"Using the Web to Generate Interest in Your Business"

Time: Tuesday, November 15th 2005, 10 - 11:30 a.m.

Location: Winchester Library, 80 Washington Street, Winchester, MA.

Kaj Kandler, founder of Conficio, will focus on how entrepreneurs and small businesses can use the Internet effectively to promote their business. He will teach how E-Mail and a Web-Site can be used to reach prospects and stay in contact with customers. Mr. Kandler believes that the Internet can be a very cost effective way for local business to deliver customer value.

Network @ The Library is open to all, especially entrepreneurs, consultants and others who are self-employed, providing them with an opportunity to meet others like themselves, talk about common problems, and learn about solutions and resources. For more information, visit http://www.winpublib.org/network.htm call the Reference Desk at 781-721-7171 ext. 20, or e-mail Janet Nelson at jnelson@minlib.net

Conficio develops animated software manuals for business applications. Animated software manuals enhance training and support for average users of PCs. Conficio's manuals are rich in screencasts, demonstrating functionality instead of describing it with words.

About Computer Jargon

2004-11-29T14:06:00.000-05:00

Today I want to confess, I'm guilty as anybody else. I speak computer jargon.

Computer and software are a business of precision. We expect the machines to work reliably and predictably. That implies one has to talk about their functions in a precise manner.

However, this makes using computers a challenge, because it is complex to talk precisely about their behavior. Software developers, and tech writers in particular, do define a language around their creation and they use it. Naturally, end users do not speak that language. Hence the communication problems.

There is a solution to this. As with any other language too, one party has to learn the language of the other. Which one do you prefer?

As an end-user, learn the language of each application you use
Ask the publisher/developer of the software to understand the language(s) their end-users speak

Please comment and tell us why you prefer the particular solution.

Transforming Computer Jargon into Visual Help

2004-11-07T13:47:00.000-05:00

I love to help people with their computers. I also love to solve problems.

The current state of computer 'online' help is a problem. Wouldn't you agree? Users have given up on using the help-menu in software applications. The typical complain goes:

1) I can't find what I'm looking for!
2) If I find something, I have a hard time understanding the prose!

I set out to solve this problem by creating visual help.

Alexa verification blog

2000-09-21T18:05:00.000-04:00

Contact me at kajkandler _a@T_ conficio.com

url: http://conficio.blogspot.com/
site_owner: Kaj Kandler
address1:
address2:
city: Melrose
state: MA
country: USA
postal_code: 02176
phone_number:
display_email:
site_name: Teaching software - one screencast at a time
site_description: I love to help people to understand their software. Screencasts are my tool of choice. My preferred application is OpenOffice.org

Categories for Tagging

2000-04-25T14:55:00.000-04:00