[ubuntu-uk] OpenOffice 2 in UoE Open Access Labs

[Toby Smithe]

This is very positive, and I have been preparing to do the same at my
(rather oppressive) school.

On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 14:14 +0000, chombee wrote:
> Following Ubuntu installs we've been doing for people over the last year
> or so, we found that if students are writing an essay at home on their
> Ubuntu laptop, they have to remember to export the essay from OpenOffice
> in either .doc format or .pdf (neither of which is perfect). The
> university computers in the open access labs run Windows with MS Word.
> 
> So Erik Chakravarty and I wrote a letter to the university computing
> services explaining the situation and asking them to deploy OpenOffice 2
> due to its support for the Open Document format. A couple of weeks
> later, the university replied and said they've looked into it and will
> be deploying OpenOffice 'early in the new year', and even suggested
> they'd be training their staff to provide support for it :)
> 
> Students using Ubuntu on their home machines will now be able to save
> their work in OpenOffice, and open it in OpenOffice when they get to
> school.
> 
> More info, including a PDF of our letter and a photo of their response,
> can be found on this page:
> 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SeanHammond
> 
> Now we'll wait for computing services to do the real work of deploying
> OpenOffice. When that happens, it might be a good time to try and get an
> article about it in the student newspaper. 
> 
> Ideas for following up on the employment include asking the university
> to establish some sort of open formats policy, whereby they'll provide
> support for open formats wherever they can. For example students should
> always be allowed to submit work in OpenOffice as opposed to MS Word or
> PowerPoint formats, and lecture notes and assignments etc. should never
> be available only in closed formats. And getting some Linux (probably
> Fedora) machines available for students in the open access labs,
> alongside the Windows machines and Macs that are already provided. The
> School of Informatics already runs a very large number of open access
> Fedora machines, but they are open only to informatics students.
> 
> 
>