Wednesday, March 27, 2013

LibreOffice 4.0 Live, Other Projects

Monday night we had a window of opportunity and installed LibreOffice 4.0.1 for all of our users.  The install went cleanly and Tuesday morning we received NO calls with anyone having problems with their documents.  Considering how many users we have and the number of file formats they are opening, that is wonderful news.  Congrats to the developers and QA people!  First launch of LO 4 offered them a custom dialog with new features, and the opportunity to receive a copy of LO for Mac/Windows for home use.    A high number of people requested media, and we're happy that they are are using it on their own.

In the coming days, I'll be adding desktop triggers for Corel Draw, MS Visio and MS Publisher files so that they just open automatically with LO 4.0.  This will at least allow people to view documents that we receive from outside contacts that assume everyone has licenses for such software.  Very often, the files just need to be *viewed* and not edited and this eliminates having to spend money.

I submitted a few feature requests to the LO developers for enterprise users.

We have been working on moving all of our user passwords into LDAP and that is going well.   I have been working on some issues with syncing data between OpenLDAP and Zimbra, and making progress.  I put some code into our support portal software to allow our staff to create new LDAP entries from a LDIF file without having to do so on the command line.  A few clicks now and it's all done and pre-checked for validity and has all of the required attributes for our various downstream needs.

I have been looking at auto provisioning user accounts in Alfresco as part of a pilot program.  Alfresco needs user groups in LDAP which were not required with Zimbra.  So I have started to facilitate this change and make it easy to put users into departmental and divisional groups.  Once done, I'll try and get Alfresco to automatically create all of our users.  We are going to explore using Alfresco in IT, and once we have a work flow...show it to the other departments and try and obtain funding for a support contract and possibly adding an employee to be the custodian of the data.

The HP 5745 thin client was discontinued and we ordered the replacement model and it has arrived.  I'll spend some time checking it out and will take pictures and review it here on this blog in the near future.  Never enough hours in the day sadly.

Very happy to see that SuseCon 2013 will be in Orlando again this year.  It's a no brainer that we'll be attending and it will be nice to chat with all of you in person.

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