Hello all, On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Indranil Das Gupta <[email protected]> wrote: <snipped> > I've been doing some of these, but it seems that it would more fun if > more people joined in. I'm willing to share the little I've learnt and > mentor folks interested in actually building such prototypes around > OpenOffice.org and the ODF (OpenDocument Format) standards. > > I expect this wild-geese-chase project to last about 90 - 120 days. > > Anyone interested?
I wish to thank all those who have responded so enthusiastically. Let me share my thoughts far. Please remember that these are not cast in stone and suggestions for change or improvement is always welcome. DEFINING THE USER EXPERIENCE =================== The office desktop and the tools we use for everyday work essentially defines our everyday computing experience. The infrastructure software are always there, but those e.g. a postfix mail server or an apache web server hosting an intranet for internal documents, are rarely "seen" by the users except when they very rarely fail to work (i.e. while sending a mail or the intranet failing with a 404 error). However, when we are entering data into a spreadsheet or adjusting the columns of a table in a wordprocessor, we, the users, are acutely aware of the software. And therein lies the catch. If we can't do what we have been doing on the s/w we've been using so far, we are *not* interested in it. It is also human nature to resist change. In that sense, to the average users it clearly doesn't matter whether s/he is using legal or un-licensed software or whether it is proprietary or free / libre / opensource software. But beyond the realm of individual users, lies a greater world. The world of businesses and business users. Establishments large and small, have come to depend on Office productivity applications like MS-OFFICE to automate a large part of their daily data processing tasks. Tasks which typically lead to generation of formatted documents, reports or takes the shape of business intelligence. USE-CASE #1 Lets share some experience to get the perspective. Some time back I had come in touch with a 3,000+ desktop migration to FOSS at a indian company. Not to put a fine point, the migration largely failed. The management and the users had been promised that all their MS-Excel spreadsheets, used to manage and maintain their in-house workflow data, would be 100% compatible with OpenOffice.org 2.x out-of-the-box. Nothing could have been further from the truth, and all too soon it became apparent to everyone around. Lets face it, we have something called "Excel ERP" going around among the business users. Over the years, in-house IT / MIS folks has been building up complicated, interlinked, inter-departmental spreadsheets with multiple user based updates and protected cell ranges and sheets. Developed in-house, these have become the backbone of many a traditional brick-and-mortar business. There is hardly anything surprising in this - even Google used to use a desktop financial accounting software like Quicken for managing their accounts for many years. USE-CASE #2 Lets now share another experience, ILUG-CAL.ORG has been carrying out IOTA sponsored training of school teachers in the North 24 Pargana district. The training imparted would focus on using a FOSS desktop - typically GNOME, OpenOffice.org and using the Internet for communications (email, instant messaging, chat) and a Commons projects like Wikipedia, Gutenberg, PLoS etc for introducing ICT-enabled teaching-learning methods. We found the teachers insisting on being shown how to use OpenOffice.org to tabulate marks, generate marksheets and report cards and manage the school accounts. They were tied down to using proprietary software developed by a local company using Microsoft Visual Basic and MS-Access. Once we hacked together a demo and generated marksheets using the MailMerge wizard, we saw a huge leap in interest towards adopting OpenOffice.org. OBJECTIVES AND GOALS ============== 1. To make accessible in multiple languages (at present English, Bengali and Hindi) pointers to updated technical and support resources on OOo 3.x 2. To create short but lucid instructional wiki pages, videos and podcasts (in English, Bengali and Hindi) on solving various tasks using OOo 3.x - our approach would task-oriented rather than being software application oriented (those familiar with the OLPC project will immediately know what we are talking about) 3. To build small easy-to-use tools (macro libraries, OOo Extensions etc) , ready-to-use / customizable templates that will enrich users' experience of using OpenOffice.org 4. To test, QA, identify and file bug reports when things do not work as expected or as described in user / developer documentation. 5. To explore ways to use OpenOffice.org 3.x as an automation server for parsing and processing data, much like MS OFFICE apps can be used to build in-house SMB workflows. 6. To identify MS Excel specific macros and how these can be ported to OpenOffice.org 3.x 7. To create a community of OpenOffice.org power-users and developers who will be able to guide and design migration cases to OOo and ODF 8. Having fun and contributing to FOSS :D SO WHAT'S THE NEXT STEP ================ A separate mailing list on Googlegroups - [email protected] has been setup with all those who have expressed their interest. Lets get talking over there. Anyone else who wants to join in is more than welcome. cheers -indra _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dgplug.org/listinfo.cgi/users-dgplug.org
