Re: OpenOffice 2.0/ StarOffice 8.0

[Ammar Ali <ammar at opensource dot ps>]

Dear Waleed,

Happy Eid.

Your timing is perfect with regards to a migration effort taking place 
in Palestine. With support from the Ministry of Telecom. & IT, people in 
government are actively being switched and encouraged to switch over to 
OO2.0 as their main office suite. In some cases, the change is more 
drastic involving switching the entire OS. Kubuntu 5.10 to be exact.

There is nothing to indicate usability problems at this point. Some 
minor changes were needed to select a better looking default font, and 
enable Arabic file names to show up properly in the open/save dialog 
boxes of OO2.0. Training is a must, I believe. There are a few 
discrepancies here and there that can be confusing to non-technical 
users. A simple walk through and maybe an online help guide, with the MS 
Office user in mind, will be sufficient in most cases since the concepts 
are really the same.

Arabic support has come a long way, and is very good so far. But there's 
room for improvement, especially with regards to the import/export 
features to and from MS based formats. PDF exporting also needs some 
work, but I'm not aware of the details at this point.

One critical missing feature is Arabic spell-check and grammar check. I 
know these are not exactly perfect in MS Office, but they exist and many 
people depend on them to a certain extent. Many have sited these missing 
feature as reasons not to make the switch to OO2.0.

I hope you find these simple comments useful.

Regards,
Ammar Ali;

Waleed Hosny wrote:

> Hi All,
> I would like to wish all of you a happy Eid vacation. I am interested 
> to get some feeling about your evaluation of Arabic support in 
> OO2.0/SO 8.0.
> Things like:
>
> - Is it usable from the user interface point of view?
> - Is it easy for users to switch to OO/SO? or do users needs training 
> to switch to OO/SO?
> - Are you satisfied with the current Arabic support?
> - What Arabic features do you like to see in next releases?
>
> I would appreciate all your comments/experience.
>
> Thanks in advance.