Plan-B for Software Documentation

Apple’s notebooks have become increasingly popular. OpenOffice.org does run on Apple’s MAC OS X operating system However it does not comply with the OS X user interface, called Aqua. Sun Microsystems has now decided to commit two full time developers to produce a full MAC OS X compliant port of OpenOffice.org.

Even among the geeks at recent BarCamp Boston 2 it seemed they had gained a majority. So it comes to no surprise that OpenOffice.org on Apple’s OS X is seen as deficient, because it lacks full integration into the User experience. The current version requires the X windowing system to be installed. This poses a double whammy for users, because

1. It is an extra installation step, that might not so experienced users from using it
2. It does conform to the X Window user interface created for Unix systems, with significant differences to the way other programs work on OS X

There is a porting project underway which has been run solely by volunteers so far. Sun now committed two full time developers to support these efforts. Unfortunately this is only one of two projects that work towards the same goal. The second project being NeoOffice, which tries to achieve the Aqua user interface through using Java. I wished that those two projects could pool their resources and expertise in order to achieve this very desirable goal faster.

Sun and the OpenOffice.org community found an agreement Pentaho to integrate business intelligence features into the next release of OpenOffice.org. Pentaho has recently integrated formerly separate open source projects JFreeReport, Mondrian, Kettle, and Weka to a powerful business intelligence server complete with reporting, analysis and OLAP capabilities.

The project offers a J2EE compliant reporting server, that can connect to many data sources and integrates workflow to create and distribute important report information to the authorized people in an enterprise. The project also offers a powerful report designer based on Eclipse and is modular so it can be integrated into other applications.

Apparently, Sun has decided it will build a Report designer of its own that defines reports in Pentaho’s formats. These reports will draw data from the Pentaho business intelligence server as well as from other sources.

If you want to see how example the integration of OLAP features into an Excel spreadsheet could look like, watch the demos of Jedox Palo Server a repository and OLAP server for Excel spreadsheets. These demos cover a specific case of OLAP and Spreadsheet integration, which I think is one possible use of the OpenOffice.org Business Inteligence integration project. However, it makes the abstract term of business intelligence more concrete. By the way Palo announced at the beginning of the year that it seeks sponsors to build a spreadsheet server for OpenOffice Calc. The sponsors role is to help cover the cost of open source development and to become first users.

Looks like Michael Dell, the iconic oner of Dell Computers, is looking deeper into Linux on Dell computers. According to the corporate Biography Michael uses a Laptop with OpenOffice.org on Ubuntu Linux.

I guess Michael did receive the letter from the OpenOffice.org community offering to satisfy the apparent demand for OpenOffice.org on Dell Computers. May be this prompted him to check it out himself.

Dear Michael,
if you need a help with OpenOffice.org, you are very welcome to join Plan-B for OpenOffice.org where we answer questions and demonstrate the features of OpenOffice.org with screencasts.

Truly Yours,
Kaj

I’m going off topic for this post about PayPal.

I just completed a change of e-mail address at Phil Taylor’s website for Joomla components. Phil has an unusual security scheme, asking for any purchase date to verify my identity. Well, I bought his components 2-3 years ago and his page reminded me that I must have payed with PayPal. But I could hardly remember what day I bought the component.

So, I went to PayPal to see if I still could find the transaction in the archives. It turns out, PayPal is doing a really good job here. The site allows you access to all back transactions, even years ago. Wow! That is much better than most banks that cut you off after 3, 6, or 12 month.

It came to me as a shock how many transactions I have made with through PayPal over time. I thought I used them really only occasionally, but over the years it adds up.

Thanks PayPal, you saved my day!

Ted Haeger lets us know that Novell just released its own edition of OpenOffice.org.

Thanks to Ted I now know why Novell is cooking its own version. Novell feels that the open source model is a good one. They follow the intention of open source to solve one’s own problems and contribute back to the community. In Novell’s case they solve the issues of their Linux customers and benefit all others too. All Novell additions are factored into the main stream OpenOffice.org eventually. While the community does absorb the contributions, Novell does enjoy the benefits of an advanced version that makes their brand of Linux more competitive. That sounds like a fair deal to me.

Now the Novell developers even released a version of Novell Edition OpenOffice.org for Windows. Why? Because they learned from their own experience that it sometimes takes a few baby steps until you are ready to switch from Windows to Linux. Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.org is such a baby step. Lets hope that the Mac version is not far behind. Although I’m not sure how many Mac users can’t wait to switch to Linux.

The OpenOffice.org community has written a letter to Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Computers to offer help in making the wishes of their customers happen. Dell Computers recently opened DellIdeaStorm, a website to solicit customer ideas and wishes. One of the top items with over 24,000 votes in two days was OpenOffice.org pre-installed on Dell computers.

The OpenOffice.org community offers in the letter help to make this happen. They are proud that their product is desired by so many of Dell’s customers and want to work with Dell to offer the open source office suite pre-installed as standard or an option.

As of today “Pre-Installed OpenOffice | alternative to MS Works & MS Office” is the second most popular request on DellIdeaStorm with over 75,000 votes.

Californian Democrat Mark Leno introduced a bill that requires the Californian government be equipped to store and exchange documents in an open, XML-based format. This legislation would stipulate this requirement starting 2008.

Massachusetts was the first state that recognized how important it is to store and archive office documents in a format that can be guaranteed to be readable in 30 or 50 years from now. Software that reads proprietary document types can vanish with the company that produces it and the support from rivals to support this format will vanish shortly thereafter. This can leave you with a heap of bits, perfectly preserved on tape or other storage media which is not reproducible for the human eye. And after all that is the purpose of all document archiving. There response was to include a similar mandate in the id term IT plan, requiring storage and archiving of documents in ODF or PDF.

We will see how this proposed bill will work out and what it’s effects are. Currently only ODF, also known as ISO 26300, does fulfill the requirements as storage format. And OpenOffice.org is the most widely distributed program with comprehensive support for ODF. While there exist import filters MS Office they are currently limited to text documents (MS Word) and do not include spreadsheets or presentations.

Dell computers the widely popular manufacturer of computers for home and business, has lately done not so well. Now they have a new idea, listening to their customers and customers to be. Dell opened a website soliciting ideas how to make better Dell PCs. the site is called Dell Idea Storm and allows user participation in form of posts, comments and voting on other people’s proposals.

Interestingly, the most prominent ideas are not about competing with Apple on design or with IBM/Lenovo on ruggedness. The most popular ideas are “pre-installed Linux”, “pre-installed OpenOffice.org” and computers with no software at all. The most popular anti request after a few days is an option of “NO EXTRA SOFTWARE OPTION”, leaving out AOL or Earthlink offers.

I have offered a few ideas myself, such as “Recessed USB bay” and “No glaring screens for Laptops”. While I certainly welcome a company listening to their customers, I’m not too happy with the way Idea Storm counts the votes. I find it inflationary that every passerby voting is counted as 3 votes and every user logged in to the system is counting 20 votes for a single click.

Jedox, the company behind the Palo Spreadsheet server has started to seek sponsors for supporting OpenOffice.org Calc. In an interesting marriage of open source and commercial project sponsorship, they have found pledges from an Australian Winery and some German engineering firms. However, at this point the tally stands at 6500 Euro, which is not much for a medium size software project.

The idea behind this effort is to store spread sheet data on a server and offer OLAP capability to create sophisticated reports, that can be aggregated among many dimensions, such as sales data by month, quarter, year, sales person, region, customer size, promotional costs, support costs or any combination of these. This kind of application gears towards enterprise customers who need analytical aggregation of data to support decision processes.

Palo server is an open source project and is currently only available for Microsoft Excel.

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).