Monthly Newsletter

Dear readers,

This newsletter covers the holiday period of July and August. Recently, there have been was a lot of big announcements and interesting news articles in the open source world recently, thus we devote a lot of space to these in this edition.

In this edition:

- Knowledge base : Choosing an Open Source CMS
- LinuxDays 2008 : Slides and audio recordings are available to download, IBcom give their view on the event
- Partner News : Alfresco closed a deal with Adobe, OpenExpo Zurich in September, OpenSuse 11, Red Hat's OpenJDK certified by Sun, Ubuntu 8.04 MID
- OSS News : Firefox 3 and world record, Open Moko release the Neo FreeRunner, Nokia frees Symbian, Acer promotes Linux, MS-OOXML normalization halted, Ubuntu MID, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, Eclipse 3.4, Subversion 1.5, Wine 1.0
- Linalis launches - Spreadsheet consolidation : The solution for consolidating spreadsheets
- Next training courses

If you want to follow our news on a daily basis, we have recently enabled a new RSS feed for all things Linalis-related. Should you require more information on this feature, don't hesitate to contact me.

Have a nice summer!

Michaël Dupont

When we have to create or update a website, choosing the right CMS is crucial. Pick a too complex one, and you end up using a product which is heavy to customize and maintain, while you're only using a tiny part of its possibilities. Pick a too simple one, and you will limit your opportunities to evolve the functionalities.

Our article (in French) in the July-August edition of IBcom tackle on this issue, analyzing the most widespread Open Source CMS. So which one will you need, eZ Publish, Typo 3, Plone, Drupal, Joomla! ?

Read the article

For those among you that couldn't attend LinuxDays or missed some conferences, we are pleased to announce that slides and audio recordings of most of the conferences are available online! To download visit the LinuxDays website.

The July-August edition of IBcom includes an article by Manuel Housset about LinuxDays and Open Source in general. A rather positive one, as one can read for instance: "The Free Software backers won the battle. Nobody can say any longer: 'I'd rather be wrong buying Microsoft than be right choosing something else.'"

Following the article, Marie-José Jones on IBcom's blog takes a look at Open Source's evolution (in French), the way it's currently taking off in the corporate world, the latter becoming the central place of Open Source Software production, and how this evolution can upset user groups of Free Software enthusiasts, who gave birth to it.

In addition, we are already planning LinuxDays 2009 ; we will soon be providing some news about next years event.

The next edition of OpenExpo, the Open Source show by /ch/open, will take place Wednesday and Thursday September 24 and 25 in Zurich. Their program is soon to be completed, but some booths are still available. It's possible to book one until the beginning of August. Please go to their website for registration.

Having already integrated Flex some time ago, Alfresco is getting even closer to Adobe products by signing a technological partnership with the latter for integrating their ECM software in Adobe LiveCycle Entreprise Suite, a suite of integrated software for automating processes. Alfreso will take care of the ECM part. Don't forget that Adobe has made Flex open source, as well as making available the specifications of the Flash format, a few months ago.

See the services we provide around Alfresco

Red Hat now providess the first 100% open source version of Java. Starting from Sun's OpenJDK, which was lacking in some areas where the official code couldn't go open source, the company and the community completed a Java implementation that has just passed the strict TCK test from Sun, validating it as completely compatible with the official Java.

See the services we provide around Red Hat

The long awaited OpenSuse 11.0, community avatar of Novell's Linux distribution, is now out. The main new features include the installer (completely changed), KDE4 integration, and improvements on the package manager (mostly its speed). As usual, OpenSuse showcase the most recent software and leading edge technologies.

See the services we provide around OpenSuse

If there is a field moving at lightspeed pace in the Open Source these day, it is mobile phones. Firstly, OpenMoko announces that its Neo FreeRunner is now for sale. Awaited for a long time, it's the first smartphone which is 100% Open Source from the hardware to the software, using the OpenMoko software stack. Consequently it has now an advantage over its competitors like Google and its Android platform or Qtopia from Trolltech (recently bought by Nokia). The number of presales is so high that OpenMoko is out of stock even before the first day of sales.

Will OpenMoko be a precursor, announcing a massive development of Open Source on our phones? A few weeks after buying Trolltech (Qtopia), Nokia takes control of Symbian by becoming the main shareholder and announces it will make it available under an open source license. Symbian is an operating system present on more than 60% of all mobile phones (source Wikipedia). Following this, the Symbian foundation was created, and they made the choice of the EPL (Eclipse Public License).

But there is more, as we were also told that the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS Forum) joined LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation. These two consortiums are aiming at developing a common software platform and defining standards to push for a wider adoption of Linux on mobiles phones.

For its part, Ubuntu launches Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition 8.04. Developed in collaboration with Intel, it's a version of Ubuntu Linux suitable for internet devices of embedded systems. It meets the requirements of this kind of systems in terms of screen size or power. Touch-screen handling is especially touted.

Let's leave the mobile world for the desktop one with Firefox. The famous browser from the Mozilla foundation was recently updated to its version 3 with numerous improvements. For the occasion, a tentative of establishing a worls record of downloads was set up. While the objective was to reach 5 millions of downloads in 24h, Guiness World Records officially validated a final result of over 8 millions (8 002 530 exactly, to compare with Firefox 2's 1.6 millions). Mission more than accomplished by the browser, which confirms its popularity.

Speaking of popularity, the hardware manufacturer Acer recently gained some by officially positioning itself in favor of Linux and against Microsoft at the same time, while presenting its subnotebook Aspire One, competitor of the Asus eEE. While Asus models are progressively getting bigger (and costly) to use Windows XP instead of Linux, Acer prefers to take the best part of Linux's flexibility to keep one offering small and lightweight computers.

In this rich month, announcements-wide, Wine spots the 1.0 release, 15 years after the project started. Popular among Linux users, it allows to run Windows programs at a native speed, without emulation of virtualisation, which is ideal if one wants to migrate to Linux but that a critical application is only available for Windows. The main evolution of the 1.0 release is to guarantee that a list of popular applications will always work well in futures releases of Wine.

Eventually, concerning open formats from the ISO norms side, we told you last month about ODF integration in Microsoft Office. Short after this announce from Microsoft, we learned that the normalization process of MS-OOXML is halted because of reclamations from Bresil, India, South Africa and Venezuela. These are hard times for Microsoft's own format. Moreover, the totality of the PDF format just became an ISO norm too, which used to be true only for a subset of the format.

Please also note the new releases of Eclipse (3.4), OpenOffice (2.4.1), Samba (3.2) and Subversion (1.5), all widespread open source software.

The Problem

Many organisations need to consolidate information, be it for financial reporting, budget or planning exercises, operational or strategic data gathering exercises. Typically a spreadsheet template is designed, sent out to reporting units, the template is then sent back to the central point and then the fun begins of consolidating the information. Spreadsheet consolidations can be the simple linking of spreadsheets, more complicated VBA or macros. Even in the simplist case, new versions of the data always require some changes to the consolidation approach. People who want to analyse the data, spend most of their time manipulating and consolidating, instead of understanding.

The Playing Field

This situation continues even when sophisticated ERP's and planning systems are in place. Software vendors try to replicate the standard spreadsheet capability within their own systems but as people are familiar with Microsoft Office (or even OpenOffice) tools, then spreadsheet consolidations continue to be used as the user is familiar, and the templates are quick and very flexible to design.

Overview of the solution

An alternative approach to migrating away from the use of spreadsheets in these data gathering exercises, is to « work with » the users demand, and create an environment that easily consolidates the spreadsheets, takes into account changes and versioning, but provides powerful consolidated reports and OLAP drilling for data analysis.

The Solution

Linalis, is launching this capability as a service. Instead of trying to change the way people operate, they are working with the Pentaho Data Integration and Business Intelligence suite, to perform spreadsheet consolidation processes that provide rich reporting and business analysis to centralised teams who want to understand the data, rather than spend their time creating it. And of course, the solution doesn't care if there are 10 or 1,000 units to consolidate.....and as its a license free solution, the more the better!