The newly created Hungarian government's open source resource centre is piloting the use of Wollmux, a form management tool developed and used by the German city of Munich. It is contacting some of the country's public administrations to see if they're willing to participate in the tests.
The announcement was made this morning, at the LibreOffice conference, taking place in the Italian city of Milan. Gabor Kelemen, presenting the Hungarian open source resource centre, says Wollmux eases management and creation of document templates and office forms. "This centralized management of forms and templates was one of the two big concerns that we identified when talking to the early adopters of OpenOffice and LibreOffice in Hungary."
"Luckily, the German city of Munich also had this problem, and had already fixed it. In Munich, Wollmux has boosted the productivity of the city's users of the LibreOffice suite."
Documentation
The resource centre the past months translated Wollmux into Hungarian, including the user interface and all the documentation. It also set up a sample configuration, making it very easy for Hungarian public administrations to get started.
The other major concern uncovered by the resource centre, was a centralised way to configure and set group policies for users. Kelemen: "This existed for LibreOffice running on Linux and Mac OSX, but without documentation. We fixed that. However, it did not exist yet for Windows. We fixed that too."
At the conference in Milan, Kelemen announced that the Windows client version will be included in the upcoming version of LibreOffice, 4.2.
Concentrate
The competence centre (Szabad Szoftver Kompetencia Központ), was announced earlier this year by Gábor Fekete, Deputy State Secretary for the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice. The centre's activities will be funded at least until the end of this year, Kelemen said in Milan. The centre's six workers have so far concentrated on training others on free and open source solutions, and, with help of a software development company, on adapting LibreOffice and Wollmux to the needs of Hungarian public administrations.