Subject: Rolling out AbiWord - a non developer's perspective
From: David Lechnyr (david@hr.uoregon.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 11 2001 - 21:48:42 CDT
I'm extremely impressed with all that the AbiSource team has done to-date.
I'd love to be able to support AbiSource by rolling out AbiWord and
introducing it to others in the environments I provide support for. With
that in mind, I have one or two humble suggestions from an implementer's
perspective (disclaimer -- I'm no developer). It's just a "from the
trenches" perspective on what I would face if, as a Sysadmin, I rolled out
AbiWord to our non-tech-savvy staff. I'm not familiar with your specific
development track, so my apologies if anything here has been discussed or
tabled before.
1. To introduce AbiWord into an existing work environment, the ability to
indicate a "default save-as" file-type is critical (at least, to me). For
example, most of our documents are in WordPerfect and Word format; to have
one of our non-computer savvy staff attempt to use AbiWord to open a file
with the default *.ABW filter makes this a hard sell. If AbiWord were used
for new files, no problem; but no one (at least, not myself) is going to
convert all our old documents into AbiWord format in one night -- there
needs to be a seemless way to introduce AbiWord into a non-tech environment
over the course of several months.
2. This one is perhaps a longer ways down the road, but I'll mention it here
for perspective's sake anyhow. Support for tables and mail-merges; even if
very bare-bones, it would allow for at least an easier conversion of
non-AbiWord document formats into AbiWord (the tables), and basic enough to
automate some office functions (mail merge).
Again, the AbiSource team is doing a great job and should definately follow
their own timetable and schedule of features (as opposed to following
someone else's). Hopefully, these suggestions are useful to your goals for
AbiWord.
Regards,
- David
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