Yesterday Cameron Loudon and I met with a couple of Sun people at their
Brisbane office; [Stuart Sim](http://blogs.sun.com/stuart) and David
Bunker. At a previous meeting I demoed ICE to David, and we saw some
opportunities for potential collaboration. David was kind enough to
organize yesterday's meeting when Stuart was in town.
(Stuart is *Chief Architect, Business Solutions, Global Education &
Research* and David is *Business Development Manager, Education &
Research* for Sun in Australia)
[ICE](http://ice.usq.edu.au/)is open source software, released under the
GPL. ICE leverages the power of OpenOffice.org and therefore StarOffice,
both of which are controlled by Sun. It is our understanding that Sun
are trying to promote the use of StarOffice in universities, in order to
capture the hearts, minds and keyboard fingers of a new generation of
office software users, leading them away from Microsoft's domination of
desktop computing.
The presentation is embedded in the document below, and you can [view
it](http://ptsefton.com/files/ice_for_sun.slide.htm) as a Slideous slide
presentation as well.
Some key points from our discussion:
- Sun have lots of resources to help with outreach on projects like
ICE – if and when the time comes.
- Sun do want to drive adoption of Star & OpenOffice.org in higher-ed,
but Stuart says that a lot of their contacts have been with IT
departments not faculty.
- There are some opportunities for ICE hosting / services that might
be of interest to a company like Sun with links into higher
education. Note that we haven't done any deals. Cameron and I were
just showing ICE and chatting...
- I said quite bluntly that OpenOffice.org Writer will not take off in
academia without usable bibliography software. I'll put Stuart in
contact with David Wilson and Bruce D'Arcus of the OpenOffice.org
[bibliography
project](http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic_Project's_Developer_Page).
#
Background on ICE
# What is ICE?
- ICE is a free (GPL licensed) content management system.
- Initial development has been to support
[USQ](http://www.usq.edu.au/)'s courseware publishing.
# ICE is ...
- Cross platform
- A web application that works offline
- Word processor driven
OpenOffice.org Word / MS Word
- Does print, web, CD and other delivery
# ICE makes...
- HTML and PDF from word processing documents.
- Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org
- Books, CD-ROMS
- IMS packages for use in Learning Management Systems
- Presentations using Slideous
# Screenshot: ICE course output
# ICE runs in lots of places
Runs as a web server on the desktop on:
- Windows
- Mac OS X
- Linux
- And potentially other Unix variants (Solaris anyone?)
(A future version will run as on online service. )
# ICE does distributed content management
- Works off-line
- Keeps version-controlled backups
- Allows collaboration
(Using the Subversion version control system beloved of programmers with
a simple web GUI)
# Advantages of using OpenOffice.org
- WYSIWYG – users working in Word have a few more 'gotchas' as Writer
is used to render to PDF.
- Master documents work.
- Bibliography tool works well (actually it doesn't).
Sun people: this is the single biggest thing that will hold back
adoption of OpenOffice. It does not have usable bibliography
software.
#
Sun
# What could Sun do?
- Fix the bugs in OpenOffice.org Word support.
- Help the OpenOffice.org **bibliography team** to make Writer a
compelling choice for academia.
- Improve the default template that ships with Writer so that it uses
an ICE-like template.
(It's currently awful)
# What's in it for Sun?
- Drive adoption of StarOffice and/or OpenOffice.org to reduce the
need for Windows.
- Reach students on their first day at university via ICE in
'foundation computing' courses.
- Sell grid-computing conversion services to back up ICE as an online
service?
(ICE uses OpenOffice.org for PDF rendering, which could be
expensive, computationally speaking)