My insights from “open source meets business” 2007
I went to Nürnberg last thursday to give a speech together with Frank Siebert (one of our consultants from DBI company) about LiMux’s migration to OpenOffice.org. Our talk was pretty well visited and the auditors were interested in our experiences. Of course, our self developed tool WollMux got much attention. And my guess was confirmed, that there’s much to do to satisfy the high level of interest in our progress. We’ll work on this.
But the conference was also interesting for me. I learned that others are often using more pragmatic solutions than we do. For example, the german city of Schwäbisch Hall uses a NX based terminal server solution (including heartbeat for HA) to get some business applications running for a couple of workplaces. Very interesting. And there are many other public offices and schools doing their daily business or teaching with free software. Most of them just do it. Sometimes a more pragmatic solution will be much better than the best detailed way ever. But discussing in heated meeting rooms and drinking coffee means fun, doesn’t it 
Jan Wildeboer from RedHat showed me the upcoming 100 Dollar laptop, which is designed for daily use in schools in developing countries, to provide them with access to knowledge and modern forms of education. Nice machine.
Finally I had the chance to discuss some facts for an upcoming european workshop on document exchange formats which I’m going to attend in march in Berlin. I think it’s important that there’s are really open exchange format for public authorities in Europe to use. Maybe there will be the first step to arrange this.
I was surpised by the very well organizated conference. Good job, heise!