Front-page (new threads) http://www.odfworks.com/forum/c-10235/front-page Threads in the forum category "Front-page" Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:04:46 +0000 http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-72472 Uruguay recommends ODF use http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-72472/uruguay-recommends-odf-use The Agency for the Development of Government Electronic Management and Information and Knowledge Society) of Uruguay recommends ODF or PDF for government purposes and government owned companies. Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:07:24 +0000 arebenti 36024 Uruguay's Agency for the Development of Government Electronic Management and Information and Knowledge Society recommend in a new document that “… the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary Powers, Decentralized Organizations and Companies where the state holds equity majority… shall distribute and receive electronic documents in, at least, one open standard for electronic documents (ODF or PDF)."

For Microsoft Office the agency recommends the SUN Microsystems plugin

]]> http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-67971 IBM asks employees to switch to ODF based product http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-67971/ibm-asks-employees-to-switch-to-odf-based-product An internal memo reached the press. Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:39:56 +0000 arebenti 36024 The Register and several other news agencies report that IBM urges its employees and members of the IBM eco-system to switch to Symphony, an ODF based product. Journalists interpret it as a move against competitor Microsoft that will add support for ODF only in version 14 of its dominant Office suite Microsoft Office.

]]> http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-63117 Commission to MEP: We are able to accept and generate ODF http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-63117/commission-to-mep:we-are-able-to-accept-and-generate-odf EU-Commissioner Siim Kallas answered to MEP Cappato (ALDE) that the Commission was able to accept and generate documents in ODF format. The Finn heads among other DGs the Directorate General Informatics of the European Commission which coordinates the Commission's IT infrastructure. Fri, 30 May 2008 15:22:08 +0000 arebenti 36024 An assistent of Italian MEP Marco Cappato (ALDE) contacted us with the news that an answer to a parliament question has arrived.

Cappato's question

Parliamentary questions
15 April 2008
E-2110/08
WRITTEN QUESTION by Marco Cappato (ALDE) to the Commission
Subject: Deployment of ISO 26300:2006
What steps will the Commission undertake to make its IT infrastructure fully compliant for the reception and propagation of ISO 26300:2006 documents?

Is any action planned to promote this standard in the European institutions?

Answer by Commissioner Kallas

E-2110/08EN
Answer given by Mr Kallas
on behalf of the Commission
(26.5.2008)

The Commission is currently able to accept and generate documents in the ISO 26300:2006 format (otherwise referred to and commonly known as the ODF format). The Commission wishes to be able to accept and generate documents compliant with different standardised formats (for example ISO standards PDF, ODF) as well as, whenever appropriate, in other widely used formats (ISO standards or not) currently used by citizens, businesses and public administrations.

The Commission has already presented to other European Institutions its technical approach to accept and generate documents in ODF formats.

Furthermore, within the framework of the Commission's IDABC programme, the Commission works with representatives of the Member States to promote and facilitate Open Document Exchange Formats (ODEF).

For more information, please see the reference site:
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/3439/5585

In other words, the Commission already supports Open Document format and recommends other European Institutions to follow.

]]> http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-54520 How to convert OpenDocument Wordprocessor files to plain text? http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-54520/how-to-convert-opendocument-wordprocessor-files-to-plain-text For MS-Word .doc files you use antidoc to convert them into plain text files. For Opendocument .odt files you take odt2txt. Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:26:39 +0000 arebenti 36024 Dennis Stosberg provides us with a simple tool or as he words it "A simple (and stupid) converter from OpenDocument Text to plain text".

odt2txt is …

* small
* supports multiple output encodings
* adopts to your locale
* able to substitute common characters which the output charset does not contain with ascii look-a-likes
* written in C, has few dependencies
* portable (runs on Linux, *BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows, Cygwin)
* licensed under GPL, version 2

]]> http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-53061 North South Wales schools prefer OpenOffice http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-53061/north-south-wales-schools-prefer-openoffice The educational sector in NSW is going to switch to OO.org. 41,000 PCs will get migrated. Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:32:20 +0000 arebenti 36024 The NSW Department of Education did not renegotiate a new three years contract with Microsoft. Instead it extended its licensing agreement with Redmond for just one year. Additionally Stephen Wilson announced they would switch to OpenOffice on 41,000 school computers.

Often these OpenOffice switch threads are just used to get better procurement conditions from Microsoft. Then the news demonstrates the value of choice between applications and the benefits of overcoming lock-in effects for the larger market, even when finally the company dissuade the public sector to switch to OpenOffice.

Computerworld NZ: NSW education downgrades Microsoft deal

]]> http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-52505 ODF now a standard in Brazil http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-52505/odf-now-a-standard-in-brazil ODF has been today named a national standard in Brazil. Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:29:48 +0000 Anonymous ODF has been today named a national standard in Brazil. Additionally there is a federal law to make it mandatory in public administrations. It is
already mandatory at least at the state of Paraná, south corner with Paraguay and Argentinian state of Misiones (where it is also mandatory).

The following English report gets into details:

On the afternoon of last Tuesday (08/04), the final translated version of the ISO/IEC 26300 was approved by members of the ABNT’s committee responsible for that activity.
According to the Brazilian laws, a National Standard needs to be written on our native language (Brazilian Portuguese) and this is why we need to translate and approve the translated text of any International Standard that is adopted as a Brazilian Standard (called here NBR). ABNT is the Brazilian National Body (NB) and handles all standardization efforts in Brazil.

]]> http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-47057 Bristol: ODF and StarOffice help us save costs http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-47057/bristol:odf-and-staroffice-help-us-save-costs The switch to another office suite and ODF saves Bristol a lot of money. Sat, 15 Mar 2008 20:17:02 +0000 Anonymous The EU Commission IDABC reports about a cost saving success in Bristol:

Bristol City Council's switch to StarOffice in 2005 has led to a major reduction of IT costs, says Gavin Beckett, the council's ICT Strategy manager. … In 2006 Bristol took the further step of adopting the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF). Speaking at a conference on ODF in the Netherlands last month, Beckett said that implementing StarOffice for 5,500 desktops in Bristol saved 1.1 million GBP (1.4 million euro) in comparison to the total cost of implementing Microsoft Office. "The licences for StarOffice cost us 186,000 GBP (243,000 euro), in comparison to 1.4 million GBP (1.8 million euro) for MS Office."

http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7409

Bristol acknowledges that its pioneer switch needs to be followed by a market learning process. Bristol needs to interoperate with less advanced Cities that use another format.

]]> http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-12194 ODF for the security-sensitive http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-12194/odf-for-the-security-sensitive What do France, Singapore, the USA, and Belgium have in common with Finland? Answer: they've all seen security-sensitive organisations and ministries switching away from MS-Office and onto ODF. Sun, 24 Jun 2007 08:44:57 +0000 pieterh 99
  • French Gendarmerie
  • Ministry of Defense, Singapore
  • United States Joint Forces Command, USJFCOM
  • Belgium Ministry of Justice
  • Finnish Ministry of Justice
    • ]]>     http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-12193 How the Finnish Ministry of Justice migrated to ODF http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-12193/how-the-finnish-ministry-of-justice-migrated-to-odf In December 2006, the Finnish Ministry of Justice decided to migrate to the open source OpenOffice.org office suite. The ministry and its administrative sector will also adopt the OpenDocument ISO standard for the file format of office documents. Sun, 24 Jun 2007 08:31:57 +0000 pieterh 99 In December 2006, the Finnish Ministry of Justice decided to migrate to the open source OpenOffice.org office suite. The ministry and its administrative sector will also adopt the OpenDocument ISO standard for the file format of office documents.

    Since the migration, OpenOffice.org is the primary office suite for 8,500 persons, with Microsoft Office still used for 1500 persons. All Windows XP workstations of the ministry and its administrative sector are installed with OpenOffice.org version 2.

    The migration decision was based on office software evaluation in 2005 and an extensive OpenOffice.org pilot project in 2006. The main results of the office software study are presented in the report including the various migration options considered during the evaluation. In the pilot project, the functionality and compatibility of OpenOffice.org was tested in daily office use. In addition, the evaluation of training and support requirements, workstation installations and configurations were among the tasks of the pilot project. The results of the pilot project are presented in the report. The report also gives information on the current status of the OpenOffice.org migration process.

    ]]>     http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-11863 How iMatix Corporation switched to ODF http://www.odfworks.com/forum/t-11863/how-imatix-corporation-switched-to-odf How we switched to ODF and saved ourselves a packet on Windows and Office licenses. Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:27:26 +0000 pieterh 99 At the start of the century, in 2000, our offices ran Windows and we used MS-Office for all our word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. When OpenOffice.org became available in 2001, we tried the 638c build, and found that it worked pretty well. A couple of us started using this for whitepapers and internal documents. When a while later, we saw that OpenOffice.org provided a one-click PDF export, we decided this was the way to go. We switched to the OpenOffice.org XML format, and used PDFs for all documents we sent to our clients. We still ran on Windows, but the viruses and trojans were starting to get really annoying. So as we upgraded our workstations, we also switched to Linux. Our office users didn't care - they ran the same OpenOffice.org and Firefox software. When OpenOffice/2.0 was released, with ODF support, we switched to that, and converted our documents to ODF.

    We don't pay Windows or MS-Office licenses any more, we don't get viruses or trojans, and over several years of migrating non-technical staff from MS-Word and Excell to OpenOffice, not a single person complained that they could not switch.

    For me, the real benefit - apart from saving a lot of money - is knowing that my company's precious documents - contracts, invoices, etc. - are now safe in a format that won't break when some vendor decides to make an arbitrary upgrade, as Microsoft have done so often. We keep these documents for ever. It's just not acceptable to be dependent on specific versions of one firms' software! Also, it's really comforting to know that the chance of sending a virus-infected document to a client is zero. With MS Office documents you just never know.

    ]]>