A couple of Questions

[CalvinR]

Hello,

I work for Service Canada and I am evaluating Open Office for use in our Kiosks that are used in our Service Canada Centres. I have a couple of questions that I need to have answered.

Are you able to just install Writer or do you have to install the whole suite of applications.

Are you able to lock down the application so that users are unable to change the toolbars or have it so that changes are not saved when the application is closed?

Is it possible to restrict saving to certain drives using the application or is this not possible?

-Cal

[Corfy]

I can only answer one of your questions, but here is the answer for that one.

You can install just Writer if you really want to, but there isn't much of a reason to do that. I don't know about your situation, but usually people want to save harddrive space when they talk about installing just Writer. However, that really only saves a minimal amount of space. The main part of the install is a kind of "base" program that runs underneath all of the OOo programs, and it is that base program that takes up most of the space. That means that the actual individual "modules" for the different programs are actually fairly small.

BTW, when I talk about the base program, I'm not talking about the database module Base. I'm just out of terms to use.

I'm not aware of any way of having the application restrict saving to certain drives, but that doesn't mean there isn't any. I would think there might be a way to restrict saving on those drives through permissions on the drives themselves (we have some drives at work that people can read but not write to, but that is set at the server level, not the client level). But then, I don't know what you are using it for, and I don't know what operating system you are using.

And I have absolutely no idea on locking the toolbars. Sorry.
_________________
Laugh at life or life will laugh at you.

[David]

So, do you really need an office suite, or just a word processor, or even just a text editor? You have a minimal word processor that comes with Windows [and I DO mean minimal.] There are some fairly well designed ones available. Abiword springs to mind. Or there are some free desktop publishing programs [word processor on steroids] that might better suit your purpose. It depends upon your particular needs. You won't need ALL the bells and whistles of a complete office suite perhaps, or perhaps you might find that need once you try it.

For the "lockdown" you might approach either a local high school, or, preferably, a local community college for efficient ways to do that, but there are external [third party] programs designed for that specific purpose for use in schools. I'd have to look them up, but you could do that as easily. You will be looking for a setup to restore the original desktop. You might start looking under "childproof" for example.

Hey, I live near Ottawa. I should be getting a tax cut for this!

David.

[jrkrideau]

[CalvinR]

Well I do need just the Writer, however I guess it doesn't really matter if I have the whole suite installed or not. It also doesn't matter what Word Processor we use, I just prefer Writer, it has the most features I've seen for an OS Word Processor, and I have good experiences with it at home.

This will be for a public kiosk that will be mostly used by people who do not have their own computer with a special emphasis on people with special needs. Right now we use Windows 2000, I would prefer to use Linux for the kiosks then I wouldn't need to worry about any of this stuff, but that's not an option at the moment. I'll look into the childproofing, and I'm probably going to restrict access to harddrives using policys, that was always my intention but unfortunalty with the way this product was originally designed that isn't the easiest way.

Thanks for the help.
_________________
-CalvinR

[huwg]

To compile a kiosk mode OpenOffice, --enable-lockdown seems to be the flag.

[CalvinR]

Awesome thanks, that's just what I was looking for.
_________________
-CalvinR