Education Project/Effort/Registration Screen

In many environments the registration screen actually detracts from the OO experience and produces no useful or relevant information. For example, in education, the users may not have reached majority and therefore cannot enter into any legal agreement, consequently agreeing to anything that appears on the screen is of no value whatsoever. Educational users (particularly younger ones) are also encouraged to dismiss any dialog box that pops up that they are not expecting or don't understand. Experience has shown that when faced with a registration screen most students will just close OO and open MS Office instead. Educational users also 'hot desk' substantially more than many other users. A student may use ten or twelve computers over the course of a day. The current registration is both burdensome as it will ask for a registration every time a student uses a machine for the first time and actually deters users from trying OO. Methods to disable the registration screen such as the -nofirststartwizard switch do not work well and adjusting configuration files manually is highly undesirable.

Because in educational establishments most machines are cloned, a method needs to be implemented where a suitably qualified and authorised person can accept the terms and conditions for and on behalf of the school and students. This should be either on install or on first run. The preferable method would be on install however the first run registration may be more generic and applicable across different operation systems.

I would offer the following suggestion :

1.Run the OO binary for the first time with a switch i.e. swrite.exe --institution

2.This would initiate a registration screen similar to the mock up attached

3.OO would never ask for a registration again on that machine (or machines cloned from that one)

This would :

1.Produce meaningful user statistics

2.Be legally acceptable

3.Not distract or dissuade students from using OO