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Hello,
Brad Rellinger a écrit :
Hello,
My name is Brad Rellinger from Anthony Wayne Local Schools in
Whitehouse, OH.
I'm Eric Bachard, working for Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.org.
We are currently evaluating the possibility of
implementing and Open Source "Office" solution into our District.
Choose a free solution for a migration is not a simple choice, and
everything must be verified.
But this is IMHO the best choice you can do. Free the file format and
your datas is the most important for public administration and/or school.
We
have approximately 2400 Macintosh computers in 6 buildings.
This is quite important, and we appreciate to be contacted this way.
Thank you for your interest in OpenOffice.org !
We are
using Microsoft Office X and realize that we will soon need to decide
on whether to sign a contract with Microsoft to upgrade to the latest
version or completely switch to an Open Source solution. Therefore we
have a few questions about OpenOffice for Mac.
Please ask :-)
1) We have been evaluating NeoOffice. After reading through their
forums, I notice that you guys cut ties with them about a year ago.
More than a year ago. The fact is I invited NeoOffice people to work
with us, several times, but they always refused.
So we continue, and will simply do it. Waiting, the door is open if
they want to join us.
This makes us second guess our inital intention to implement NeoOffice
for next school year. X11 is not an option for us. Is there a
timeline or guess on when an full Aqua, native, version of OpenOffice
for Mac will be available?
The aqua version of OpenOffice.org ( the .org is very important) is at
the step : Top 10 of issues before public alpha and uncomplete version
to test.
Other steps will come after ( see my talk at the FOSDEM :
http://eric.bachard.free.fr/FOSDEM2007/fosdem1.sxi ). This is just not
the last version, but the essential is inside. (sorry for the residual
typos you'll probably find)
Now, it costs me to answer that, but I'm sorry to avoid a precise
answer : we all are volunteers, and this is not possible to define a
timeline. Probably somewhere in 2007, I can't say more.
Another point is we depend on external help, and if we receive machines,
help from experimented developpers writing code, or doing code review,
or even money (we have paypal) of course we could finish the port
quickly. If developer stop to write code, the delay will increase too.
So it depends.
What I often advise for migrations, is to reserve some money initially
dedicated to the installation, and reverse it for the development. As
example, I recently discussed with people from a very important French
administration (I canno't mention here, because of intense lobbying ),
and that's what we decided to add in the list of prerequisites for a
migration.
Another very important point will be the Mac Users Community : once a
public version will be available, we probably will receive more help.
2) Are their any textbooks or teaching tools out there specifically for
OpenOffice?
I think you can find whatever you want all around the web, and a lot of
services already exist around OpenOffice.org installation / teaching and
so on.
What is still missing, is good migration plans, including to reverse
money, or buy machines or even provide developpers hours for
OpenOffice.org development, for middle or long term after the migration.
In one word : a real feedback including the development.
Don't forget to come with the users during the migration, because this
could be a good reason to fail.
We have 2 classes that teach the Microsoft Office Suite
and would need something to replace their textbook with.
3) How similar will the Aqua version of OpenOffice be compared to the
Windows version of OpenOffice.
Aqua port and MS version of OpenOffice.org will be absolutely the same
in "features" terms : we are Official OpenOffice.org project, we use all
OpenOffice.org features, and are synchronized with the latest code.
The only difference with Microsoft version of OpenOffice.org will be the
look and feel( e.g. the Native FilePicker).
Another simple solution : using Parallels, you should even be able to
run Microsoft version on Mac OS X in a window ( it already works
perfectly if I'm not wrong).
More important, we do intensive QA, and are running bots and automated
testtools. This helps a lot to verify and prevent regressions when
implementing new features, or detect other issues from a version to a
new one. Last but not least, users feedback helps us to close the loop
for QA.
Other points : our Team (between 7 and 15 regular people) is regularly
growing, we have dedicated builders (Maho Nakato ) and have a very good
knowledge of the build process too.
We would like to be able to encourage
students to download OpenOffice at home on their Windows computers
Or maybe on their Macs :-)
and
be able to complete the lessons taught with the Mac version.
This is not problem : the file format is the same : just open them and go !
Thanks for your time and assistance in this manner.
My pleasure. Feel free to contact us again if you have any question !
Eric Bachard
Co Lead,
OpenOffice.org Porting project
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