On Tuesday representatives of Government and the third sector will engage with Open Source service organisations on the subject of business and the cloud. Eleven business will present benefits of Open Source business solutions to decision makers including John Jackson, Camden Council CIO, Chris Farthing of the British Chamber of Commerce, and Tariq Rashid of the Cabinet Office. 17 Sessions over two days make up the programme, hosted by Sussex Cricket Club. Consultants and public sector workers may register for free on the programme summary website.
At 15.30 Tim Eyles from Collabora Productivity will present the strategic and cost-saving benefits of deploying LibreOffice within enterprise organisations.
Presentation abstract
Although Open Source software continues to take server marketshare by storm cross-sector, user-facing productivity applications remain largely closed. Writing reports, calculating spreadsheet figures, and presenting slideshows are all core business activities that are dominated by a single software vendor and a single software product.
Does it have to be like this? LibreOffice (and its forebear OpenOffice) is the trusted productivity suite of more than 80 million people. From the French Gendarmerie, to the City Administration of Munich, to the Universities of Brazil, public administrations have embraced Open Source desktop productivity. In the process they’ve benefitted from interoperability between more than one hundred document formats – the result of a cumulative development process which has extended file support over 29 years. Other significant factors for choosing LibreOffice have been its ease of integration with other Open and proprietary applications, and huge savings in license costs and customisation. LibreOffice owes these advantages to it’s Open Source origins.
A recent development has expanded the potential userbase to new quarters however. For the first time, a supported enterprise build of LibreOffice is available for business-critical environments and very large-scale demployments. LibreOffice-from-Collabora is LibreOffice stress-tested, enterprise-hardened, with business support to match. It ships with deployment tools designed for easy installation and system manage across thousands of Windows, Mac, and Linux workstations. 3 Years of support patches sustain long term stability and security, and test and integrate newer features which would otherwise be unavailable. Software support contracts provide fixed cost code support with standard response Service Level Agreements.
To participate in the full presentation register to attend “Open Source, the Cloud and your Business” at the link above. Places limited.
Participating organisations
British Open Source service providers
- Collabora
- Omnis Systems
- Fastnet
- Synchro Media
European Open Source service providers
Other Open Source service providers
- Virtual bridges (USA)
- Catalyst (New Zealand)
British third sector
- Open Source Consortium
- Open Data Institute
- Sussex Enterprise
- Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce
British public sector
- Camden Council
- Brighton & Hove City Council
- Sussex Innovation Centre
