MAMPU today begins implementing migration policy to OpenOffice.org and ODF format for documents.

Link

From April, all new documents will be in ODF and by the end of the year, all copies of MS Office will be uninstalled.

Great news for document freedom and open standards for Malaysia. Since MAMPU is the lead agency for implementing change and modernisation for the public sector, we should be looking forward to seeing Malaysian government standardising on ODF for electronic documents.

Doing graphic design work recently. I did mention that good developers are not too different from artists in that they are creative workers. Abdullah (a developer) also had to work on animations for OpenOffice awareness, and during discussions we realized that the slogans for OpenOffice were very similar to election ones.

So in keeping with current mood, here's a draft graphic to be used for Document Freedom Day coming up soon for Malaysians.

Through built in portal_tranforms for pdf, all you need to do is install pdftohtml package, and your uploaded PDFs are automatically full text indexed.

ODF support requires separate Product - AROfficeTranforms and ARFilePreview, once this and binary dependencies are installed, all uploaded ODF text documents and old OpenOffice documents are full text indexed. In addition you can get html previews.

One of the issues with managing workflows in documents is that it is difficult to do it in document formats without passing files around, or merging it and then tracking history changes. It's much easier to implement if using Plone's built in text/html online document content. You can track history/changes and everybody can lock/collaborate and see diffs. It also uses Plone's built in workflows. Usually though after it's done, you probably still want to polish it up for formatting and publishing, and want to export it to a standard document format or PDF.

That's where another Plone product comes into play, SmartPrintNG. This product then converts Plone content into different office formats. You can also customise the look and feel of the output. Thanks to purserj for pointing this product out to me.

What's great about all of this is that they're using Plone's simple UI which users seem to love. It follows familiar metaphor of files, folders and sharing them. The workflows and categorisation are also there, but don't get in the way.

Most of the info is due to the great work of Kagesenshi, and it's only his third week. It's been quite fun, to see a lot of interesting tech tasks being worked on that I couldn't get to due to lack of time. Even better, being a FOSS contributer to the Fedora Project, he knows all the stuff already and how things work including documentation setup, issue tracking and svn. He knows how to debug stuff and so on, with minimal guidance. He nows how to Google. Gasp!

It's made me set the bar higher now on possible interns and new hires for projects.

If you're an SME shop, look for FOSS contributers. If you're a student start getting involved in an upstream project now. You'll have the skills which took me a few months to teach already. You may even have a leg up over developers with a few years of working experience who are not involved with large FOSS projects.

It was a bit quiet, since most of the media attention has been given to IBM's It was a bit quiet, since most of the media attention has been given to IBM's Symphony and IBM joining OpenOffice development.

One of the key features for me is the inclusion of Extensions which is a central plugin repo like Firefox to add additional extensions and templates easily.

This at least makes it easy to add extensions like SVG import now, instead of waiting for it be available as part of OpenOffice.org itself. There other nice things like Sun Report Builder (free) and free templates. Basic templates are important for end-users, especially SMEs to get the job done without having to spend time learning how to create simple documents like quotations and simple reports.

Get it here http://download.openoffice.org/2.3.0/index.html

For Linux users, you will get it soon when your distribution includes the update by default.

http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070

"A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.

"A member of an advisory panel that voted on the standards issue in Malaysia, who declined to be identified, said Microsoft's lobbying in the country was unprecedented and reached into high levels of government.

FSFE, SIUG File Official Objections to Switzerland's Vote on MS-OOXML

.. and also threat of legal action.

1.7 Unfortunately, on the day before the Comment Resolution Meeting,
the NK 149 chairman sent an email message to the UK 14 members and
UK 14 chairman forbidding UK 14 to discuss any economic arguments,
forbidding explicitly the type of topic that is necessary to justify
or even discuss the validity of the concerned comment.  In this email,
the NK 149 chairman explicitly referred to his authority as chairman
of NK 149, the parent committee of UK, so that it was clear that
this message represented not just his personal opinion as a member of
UK 14, but a decision which would be binding for UK 14 (except, of
course, if SNV makes the decision to overrule him in this regard).
This email is archived here:
http://www.snvlivelink.ch/ll12/livelink?func=ll&objId=1284104