Defend the Parliament's Directive against Bolkestein & Council Patent Lawyers!

M$ Helps Insitutionalized Kids in Romania

We (the Romanian OpenOffice.org project) want to thank Microsoft Corporation Romania for being suddenly interested in the same project in which the Romanian OpenOffice.org native language project was interested and was planning to help out.

MS Romania representatives showed up shortly after we posted the news on our website, giving free Windows operating system as well as free MS-Office suites for the respective project.

The project initially intended to provide computer basics courses for the institutionalized kids from Romania using OpenOffice.org as the primary Office Suite.

A huge thank you to M$ for their will to help poor children :-D

FLOSS success stories and case studies

Some interesting studies and success stories about Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Linux, etc.
Worth reading.

www.eweek.com

Office 2003 vs. OpenOffice.Org

Office Suites: How We Tested

Open Source a Better Fit in Small Shops

www.newsforge.com
Linux in action: A public library's success story
Quoting:
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Over the past year, the Howard County (Md.) Public Library has migrated more than 200 public PCs from Windows 98 and Windows NT to Linux. These PCs are used both to surf the Internet and to access the library's catalogues.
[...]
They added the Gnome desktop environment, the Mozilla browser, and OpenOffice.org to complete the picture.
[...]
The results
Everyone appears to be happy with the results: patrons, IT staff, and management. The patrons get a machine they can surf almost anywhere with. The only sites they can't reach are those that require Internet Explorer. And while they can't play Shockwave games, Flash- and Java-enabled Web sites display just fine. PDFs can be viewed, and OpenOffice.org allows MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents to be displayed as well.
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oosurveys

Am currently working on the OpenOffice.org user survey redesign. Both the infrastructure and the survey need to be rebuilt from scratch.
Survey work has started and hopefully, the infrastructure will be in place soon.

BTW: All the activity takes place on the OOo marketing project's mailing lists if you want to join us. Volunteers are needed, market researchers, students in social sciences, etc. No programming skills required. There are lots of great things to be done and lot of fun all the way.

Quote from the surveys corresponding issue in IZ:
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Surveys To-Do DRAFT #1:
Possible threads for discussing are (just a first thought list):

1. key questions that we always want to ask OOo users
2. questions that we would need answered by those who use other office suites
3. what are the today's OOo project decisions that would be eased by the user's
answers
4. find possible research themes on the OOo users base and develop a set of
standard questionaires for tipical situations. Eventually create a questionaires
kit and have it added to the marketing project materials (can be printed out
then for public meetings or administered online on the website).
5. gather market researchers, sociology students, etc to develop studies on OOo
users.
6. establish a schedule for replacing the online OOo user survey periodically so
that we maximize its usefullness and sincronize it with the project's evolution
and needs in the same time.

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More can be added to this list.
Any help, suggestions, ideas are highly appreciated.