[seul-edu] Fwd: OOo school

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: OOo school
Date: Wed, 01 May 2002 17:12:32 +0800
From: Jacqueline McNally <jacqueline@decisions-and-designs.com.au>
To: leon@brooks.fdns.net

 From OpenOffice.org 2002 testimonials page. There are others, but they
only have a first name and are vague about the location. I can see whether
these anonymous people are still around and ask on the OOo lists to contact
me offlist. They have seen my name pop up a few times so they may contact
me. What do you think?

regards
Jacqueline

------
Chuck Hunnefield
Technology Coordinator
Linden Hall School for Girls
Lititz, PA, USA
www.lindenhall.org

I'm the technology coordinator for an all-girls school in Pennsylvania,
USA. We switched to OpenOffice.org in September of last year after having
moved from MS Office.

All of our student computers have OpenOffice.org installed as well as our
lab and teacher computers. I even managed to get it working on the finicky
terminal server we use for dorm connections! At some point we may move to
StarOffice 6, but the real story here is that we will continue to use
OpenOffice.org as well.

We are a boarding school. Almost every student this year either brought a
computer or leased one from us. We are also an international school with
students from all over the world. The computers they bring have all sorts
of different software installed, different (and often incompatible)
versions of MS Office, WordPerfect, Lotus, DOS-based apps, etc. Some don't
even have any office software installed at all!

What OpenOffice.org has essentially done for us is allowed us to finally be
able to standardize what we use on computer lab computers, student
computers, teacher computers, and even the teacher's home computers if they
wish. All this at minimal cost to the school or its students.

Every student here has access to OpenOffice.org, whether it is on their own
computer, the dorm terminal server, or in the labs. The familiarity pays
off handsomely as the file formats are consistent and the user interface is
essentially unchanged between machines. If we were still using MS Office,
we would be required to purchase a license for each student's computer we
installed it on and we would have to do that to achieve this same level of
consistency.

Moving to Star/OpenOffice has allowed us to start thinking about other
areas in which open source software like Linux can benefit us. Non-profit
schools like ours are always looking for ways to save money and sometimes
that involves being a bit creative and taking a few risks.

OpenOffice.org early on was quite the risk as the initial versions were a
little unstable and had no spellchecker. But with each new release we saw
the product improve into the mature software that it is today and there is
no looking back now.

I heartily endorse the OpenOffice.org project, especially for education and
look forward to its and our continued success. Thanks to all you coders out
there, and a big thanks to Sun as well for making this happen.
------

-------------------------------------------------------