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Going to OpenOffice, Step 1 Unfreezing

"Unfreezing" is a term I took out of a text book about organizational change. People have their ideas "frozen" about how things should work, so the first thing you should do to change them, is to do some "unfreezing".

How did I approach "unfreezing" with OpenOffice:
Communication:

• Say the organization is going to change (gasp)
• Email them with more information on WHY, and how they can learn more
• Speak rationally and honestly, if it's money, say that. If it's more flexibility say that. If it's both, you get the idea...
• Get feedback (I used a google docs form, somewhat ironically)

What should be in the feedback? Most will not just want to change, you should expect that. Feedback let's you identify what concerns they have and see if they are legitimate (or if you can easily explain them away). It's also essential to determine what different use cases are covered by different users.

Training: Take the feedback and engineer some training to cover the common 80% of users. (For the other 20 you can do advanced training later). A key part of training is to make sure the users have OOo installed on their machine, so they can follow along and get used to it. Another important training item is how to convert a .doc to .odt, etc (and redo any formatting that breaks).

Get more feedback on training and see if the users feel better about switching and also if you are doing a good job in training. When you think the
organization is ready, switch to OpenOffice opening all .docs, .xls, and .ppts (I haven't done that yet).

Oh right and make sure everyone gets this:
Internal docs: use .od* (ods,odt,odp)
External docs (and no external editing): use .pdf
External docs (and need to edit): use .doc, xls, ppt

So, Planet, what do you do differently?

Random Picture from India..

Banshee by default, C'mon not all of us have 4 GB of memory!

I read this (http://mrooney.blogspot.com/2009/05/karmic-desktop-uds-run-down.html) and quite like almost everything I see.

Pidgin being replaced by Empathy is somewhat sad (I really like Pidgin), but the reasons are quite good.

Disclaimer: I am quite against any Mono (the technology beyond Banshee/F-Spot/Tomboy) applications being on the Ubuntu Desktop CD for other reasons. You can likely read why somewhere else :P. This isn't necessarily about Mono.

Banshee replacing Rhytmbox on the other hand, not so much.

However, it does seem to use 3-10x more memory than RB which is very troubling (60-300MB compared to RBs fairly consistent 25MB),

Please, Please think of those of us who only have 512 Mb of ram in a laptop, or even those with less.

But clearly Banshee will get better memory usage over time..?
I reviewed it's memory usage (and others) about 2 years ago (Banshee was in dead last, then). http://gquigs.blogspot.com/2007/12/more-players-out-in-memory-performance.html

And yes, I realize Rhytmbox isn't going away, but development seems to slow in applications that lose "default" standing in Ubuntu.

Other items I am curious about: replacing gnome-pilot with multisync? any screensaver (removing) discussions? Remote desktop viewer vs terminal server client?