Hi Daniel,
On the spanish community we have done extensive case studies of migration
projects. There even has been consultants specializing on migrations of
big companies and universities. They had poured a lot of know-how into the
community and helped organizations that want to migrate a roadmap sketch
to do so.
One of the issues on your university is not that you can't take MSO out of
the machines, the issue is that even if you take it out, you still have to
pay for that license. The reason is because your university is enrolled
on a group license program which takes account of all the computers in
your university (Macintosh and Unix based included).
This is basically what they mean with proprietary lockdown, certainly this
are also the objectives why migrating away from MSO is the first step of
step out of the lockdown. Unfortunately the migration process is more
social than technical. Outlook is indeed a technical challenge but not
even compared with the social challenge of promoting OOo inhouse.
The way this migrations had come basically is making a strategy where
difererent stages take places and 'support' is the key issue on assesing
people of the changes.
My advices is to either start by having he suite available on the
university machines, the next step is to promote it and provide the right
assesment (the community usually help with documentation), and also some
distributed trainning of the difference in the suite. Ian has written a
migration guide, published on http://documentation.openoffice.org and also
you can get a printed version at lulu.com where it address the difference
between the suites.
I gave a talk exactly on large scale migrations and some of the key
challenges when doing this process
(http://native-lang.openoffice.org/conference/slides/02-April-2005-OOo-Migration.pdf).
Certainly right now is the best time to migrate since Office 2007 is
expected to change dramatically so the re-trainning will happen regardless.
On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 10:44:42 -0600, Daniel Currier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
I am a student at Illinois State University and am trying to get all the
computers switched over to OO but what I have been hearing is that the
school has contracts with Microsoft and can not switch. Is there any
subjection for encouraging this project along?
The school has presently a CD that they hand out to any student or
facility at ISU containing programs like Mozilla products. The web site
can be located at http://www.ilstu.edu/helpdesk/downloads/. Next year
they might put open office on this CD. The below quote is from the Tec
dept. after I suggested it to them:
"Thanks for your suggestion. We actually had a student technology
advisory committee review OpenOffice for use in University Computer Labs
and possible distribution on the itools cd. Unfortunately though it was
decided not to offer OpenOffice on the next release of the Internet
Tools CD or in University labs, due to unknown conflicts with other
programs. We've heard many good things about OpenOffice though and I'm
sure the use of OpenOffice on campus will be revisited next year after
more testing and research has been done with the software. Please let
us know if you have any other suggestions. Thanks."
Is there any way to help them with these "unknown conflicts?"
Also is there any way to upgrade the OO spell checker?
How can I help the two points on you web site:
"Walking post-secondary schools through the process of including
OpenOffice.org in their portfolio of applications
Resolving questions related to using and deploying OpenOffice.org by
faculty, students, and staff”
Thanks, Daniel
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Alexandro Colorado
CoLeader of OpenOffice.org ES
http://es.openoffice.org
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