Tobi Waves

by Jens Ole Hald of Hanstholm City

Another City switching away from MS Office: Hanstholm in Danmark. Jens Ole Hald of the City IT department tells us how and why they did it.

A Testing Group of 15 Users has been evaluating StarOffice for 2 weeks in spring 2002. Since November 2002 there are 300 Employees working with Staroffice and OpenOffice.

Most problems were with reading Microsoft formats but even those were minor and got mostly fixed in the meantime. Some documents need minor re-formating when opened for the first time but this is not really a problem. Internal Problems with StarOffice were not found.

Users got a 3 hour up-lift course for StarOffice to make them ready for the new tool.

At the moment the Workstations are still running on Windows. But they are looking on moving over to Linux.

On the server side they want to stay with Novel. Quote "You have to know and do a lot to make a Windows or Unix box secure. About as much as you have todo and know in order to make a Novel box insecure."

To ease the transition for the Users, the local admins have produced templates and some custom icons and menus mimicking MS Office.

Reasons for changing

The reason for changing was primarily Microsofts new more expensive licensing scheme.

Hanstholm was already (or still) using terminal based programs. On IBM Mainframes and Unix Servers. They were mainly using Word and Excell from the Office Suite.

Unix was already deployed on the server in certain areas like Web and Proxy Servers.

Initiating the Transition

In summer all employees were invited to a presentation where the head of the cities administration introduced the new application and also made it clear that the decision to move to OpenOffice was taken and could not be changed. This set the tone so that the acceptance of the new program was very good and people were mostly interested in learning how to use the product and not in discussing if they want to use it.

Problems

Users who were very experienced with MS Excel had the most problems with the transition as things in the OpenOffice Spreadsheet are working slightly different. But then again it is probably mostly due to them not really accepting the change yet. They will now get a special 1 week introduction to OpenOffice.

IBM has setup a special group concerned with improving the performance of Java. Robert F. Berry of IBM tells us of their efforts.

JVM innovation is manly driven by performance enhancements. It started out on the client side, but today Java is relay big on the server side.

Java performance on a specific hardware has developed into a major selling point.

Performance Improvements

In the memory management area, an enhanced fully threaded Marc/Sweep/Compact algorithm was developed which uses system idle time for marking and does incremental compaction.

IBMs Just in time Compiler (JIT) uses an aggressive in-lining technique which gives the jit much more code to look at and optimize. Object allocations can be improved by static analysis of their locality and then probably allocate them on the stack and thus also save on synchronization time.

Restarting a JVM is expensive, but from a transaction isolation point this is a useful concept. To make this a viable solution a JVM start and clean mechanism has been developed where several JVMs are sharing part of their environment. The startup time for an additional JVM has been reduced by about a magnitude.

Future Work

Footprint Size

Very Large Heaps gt 500 GB

Very Large Systems (n-Way Servers)

Object Pooling (e.g Jakarta Commons)

Improve decimal arithmetics for banking transactions

Improve performance on XML and XST workloads for Webservices

Conclusion

I find it rather hard to write a report on a topic I am not really fluent in :)