planetlimux.org

Next weekend it’s time for FOSDEM10 in Brussels. I’ll take part and give a short lightningtalk on saturday noon.

If you want to meet me feel free to contact me here (via comment), at identi.ca, twitter or at the beer event on Friday night.

Cu in Brussels!

Last week Mitchell Baker made a short stopover at LiMux headquarters during her visit to Munich. She’s the chairperson of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation. We invited her to have a cup of coffee with us and she agreed. Fine

Mitchell welcomed that Munich is using Firefox and Thunderbird for all of its 15,000 desktops for years now. A great achievement. The discussion was about the success of Firefox, the reasons why Thunderbird is behind the browser in popularity and the future of enterprise calendaring. During the coffee meeting the Linux-Magazin conducted a video interview, within Mitchell talks about many other topics.

After about one hour Mitchell left the relaxing coffee break to continue her Germany tour with the next stop, the Open Source Treffen München.

Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) and Karl-Heinz Schneider (CIO Munich)

Again one more year is over now and yes, it’s time to look back what has happened in 2009 in and around the LiMux project. That’s my personal look back, not neccessarily the one of the City of Munich.

There are again some rumors about LiMux’ dead here in Munich. I don’t want to comment on the origin of them, but to the responsible company: This doesn’t work out. LiMux is more alive than ever and the story goes on very well. Sure

To encounter the many rumors and anti-lobbying activities, I’m running my personal comments in this blog. And in 2009, I started an own category “LiMux questions” with the first article “Why did Munich choose free software“. Feel free to ask questions to me.

ODF as standard, OpenOffice.org everywhere

LiMux has achieved one very important goal. The open standard Open Document Format (ODF) is now Munich’s primary used internal document exchange standard, beside of PDF for non-editable documents. Congratulations to all, who made this great success happen! Our standard office workplace consists now of OpenOffice.org (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw), Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and many other sometimes needed apps like e.g. GIMP.

This achievement is not just replacing one office software by another. Well, every workplace is migrated to OpenOffice.org, but it was an almighty effort to be able to do this switch, to get rid of many vendor lock-ins created in the past. Over 20,000 templates have been consolidated and migrated, either to templates, macros or web apps. Most of them use our self developed free software WollMux to assist our employees in the administration’s template jungle. A number of business apps had to be adapted to use ODF instead of vendor locked-in Microsoft mechanisms.

SAP is one of them, one of the apps penetrating many of our business processes, the same like in other big companies/administrations. We did some self customizations to enable the communication with OpenOffice.org. And of course, we shared our experiences (at Linuxtag, thx to Uwe Hähle). We want to publish our customizations, but at the moment the SAP company is examining the legal aspect for some months now. We’ll see, if 2010 might be a break-through.

LiMux Basisclient pilots ready

Another achievement in 2009 was the establishment of linux client pilot areas inside every of our 12 departments. This was, beside the OpenOffice.org migration, the fundamental step to increase the drive for our client migration in general during the upcoming years. Yes, these are only small areas (together with our completely migrated departmetns round about 2,500 clients), but to get them up and running is important to be able to get a closer look into the IT infrastructures, the needed business apps and their interfaces inside of every single department (which invented the wheel for its own in the past). And of course, to train the IT staff step-by-step for this technical change.

LiMux’ Community Engagement

We try to be part of as many as possible events to actively share our experiences and to show: YES, Munich can! If interested, I try to put them into LiMux’ google calendar. We also started our inofficial twitter feeds or identi.ca dents. And I upload some of our talks at planetlimux.

Important for me was the winning of the German DebConf 2011 bid, so I hope to win the global bid in March 2010 and to welcome the Debian community in Munich in 2011.

We’re also part of the Open Source Meeting, a new event created by OpenOffice.org and Mozilla in Munich, which will take place every month from 2011 and targets interested beginners and professional free software enthusiasts as well. @Florian and Carsten: good job, go on!

Of course, I have to mention our WollMux. This year we started the WollMux Roadshow together with DBI company and the Linux Solutions Group (LiSoG), including events in Munich, Stuttgart and Hamburg. It’s like a promotion tour for OpenOffice.org as basis, WollMux for template management and Munich as the one bringing both together. Every event got well criticisms and we’re planning to go on next year.

Improving ODF as leading open standard was the goal of the first ODFplugfest in The Hague. I took part to get an impression of things moving in this (former) battlefield and I was amazed about the team work done there.

We’re committed to give others back our experiences after 2 years of office migration and we took part in the first OpenOffice.org congress of Economy and Administration in Wiesbaden, and we also joined the OOoCon in Orvieto later this year.

LiMux – the upcoming future

The whole project will be adapted during the next months for the final big step, the client migration in general. Some improvements and optimizations in the project structure, to learn from the past and be ready for continuing the success story.

For me there is a big change, a good one in my opinion. From 2010 on I will be responsible for just one topic: Munich’s external IT communication and relationships, especially in the field of open standards and free software. Yes, I worked on this topic also during the last years, but from now, it’s the only one I can improve in a more general view, not only with LiMux as focus. Interesting times ahead for me

And now finally…

I’d like to thank all of my team members, all of our partners, thanks to everyone giving us feedback and helping us by writing free software!

Thank you all and see you next year!

Florian