ICE is a free (GPL licensed) content management system.
Initial development has been to support USQ's courseware publishing.
Cross platform
A web application that works offline
Word processor driven
OpenOffice.org Word / MS Word
Does print, web, CD and other delivery
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
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. )
Works off-line
Keeps version-controlled backups
Allows collaboration
(Using the Subversion version control system beloved of programmers with a simple web GUI)
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.
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)
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)
