[Debconf-discuss] Ad-Hoc Talk Announcement: A glimpse at LiMux – Maintaining lightweight office-based business applications
Tuesday 15:00, Madrid
Preface
The municipality of Munich runs a Debian-based free desktop system on
18.000 machines, typically called »LiMux«. When maintaining such a big
amount of installations in such a heterogeneous environment, unforeseen
demands come to surface. This talk gives a typical example. Questions
may cover other LiMux-related topics, too.
Abstract
Office applications, particularly spreadsheets, are used pervasively to
model and support business processes. This is promoted further by
extensions and macros: office applications usually provide means to
extend them programmatic. While this is fine at first, there are life
cycle nightmares lurking ahead: self-baked macros provide hardly what
you expect to maintain an economic life cycle, and there is a tendency
to provide functionality for which office applications are not the
platform of choice.
When maintaining an office suite, new releases inevitably exhibit
incompatibilities and deficiencies in pre-existing customer macros, and
these need to be addressed. There are two radical answers: a) leave the
business department with their own crap, risking that they will not
accept your office service in the long run; b) take over maintenance of
macros yourself.
An economic strategy acts somewhere in between: try hard to minimize the
number of macros in production, but maintain those actively for which no
substitute is available.
The talk gives an overview how the LiMux project in Munich had coped
with that situation, and which tools we have developed to support
maintenance.
About the presenter
Florian Haftmann works as IT system developer at the municipality
administration of Munich (Bavaria / Germany) since 2011. On his journey
through the vast fields of Open Source Systems in the city, Office
macros once have stuck to his shoes and have continued to accompany him
until today.
--
PGP available:
http://home.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/haftmann/pgp/florian_haftmann_at_informatik_tu_muenchen_de
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