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Is The Microsoft-Free Office Possible?
One Clan Anonymous Coward member asks this question regarding viable alternatives to the entire suite: "The company for which I work is presently deciding on software and hardware standards for employee desktops. A couple of days ago a radical thought occurred to me: could the company use Sun's StarOffice suite in place of Microsoft Office? If so, it might save the company a lot of money! So I cadged some free copies from the local Sun sales office and spread 'em around. For an integrated office suite, it doesn't look half bad. And it may allow some of us to keep our 'nix desktops :-). The question is: can StarOffice really be used in place of Microsoft Office? The big concern is, of course, exchanging MS-Word and MS-Excel files with customers and vendors. Does anybody out there have any experience with deploying StarOffice in place of MS-Office on a company-wide scale?"
TigerPlish asks: "[I wish to] find or develop a cost-effective e-mail solution that'll support Microsoft Outlook. All the functions MS-Exchange provides must be supported, in particular, the ability to migrate an ACT2000 database into an Outlook contact list..complete with searches, etc. So far, the other geeks at work are pushing for MS Exchange, and Lotus Notes, both running on NT. My suggestion is HP's OpenMail, which I'm now starting to play and get familiar with - and it's turning to be quite a bear to configre. At least it sends and gets mail from the internet - tho the x.400 to internet name mappings are truly hideous. Other than HP's OpenMail..are there any other Outlook-compatible server solutions for linux? They can be either payware or open-source..."
Compatibility with Office's contact management features has been a big issue with many of the submissions I get regarding Office replacements, unfortunately I didn't get much information in this regard from the last time this question was raised. It would be interesting to see how much has changed in this area over the past 18+ months.
Lumpy asks: "Is there a program that I can use from Perl (or as a daemon/ etc..) that will converse with an Exchange server for sending and receiving email? Our corporate servers are only Exchange based, and will not open up a POP3/SMTP server for use by non-MS systems."
Which is, as most of us know, another way Microsoft locks offices into their infrastructure. Has there been any progress made on solutions to this problem? I ask this primarily for cases where where administrators are unwilling to go through the trouble of enabling POP3 and SMTP services for their all-Microsoft networks.
Here's a similar question from OldGrover: "Does anyone know any information on the format Outlook uses to talk to Exchange? Where can I find this info? I'd love to have a perl module that talks to an Exchange server and I see no such beast on CPAN, so I'm perfectly willing to write one, but obviously I need the data. If the data isn't available, what are my potential liabilities if I just figure this out myself? (Watching packets, or whatever). Where are the Evolution guys getting their info? If I could, I'd use something else, but there are an awful lot of companies out there using Exchange. My biggest beef with it is its lack of scriptability and transparency and a Perl module with all the power of Outlook (mailing list updates, querying, mailbox manipulation) would go a long way towards helping me resolve that. I'm willing to put in the time on this, but I have to know the lay of the land first. Comments?"
Decyphering the Outlook<->Exchange dialect would go a long way into opening up the office to other systems. A Perl module implementing such a thing could almost directly plug into CSCMail, for example. However, reverse engineering the protocol might prove problematic, even if it was done in countries where reverse engineering is legal, since Microsoft can still put heavy pressure on anyone choosing to use that information. What legalities would be involved here? Could such a feat be performed legally?
What about Calendar sharing? I know Outlook has functionality for scheduling meetings and appointments via e-mail. Are there any Open Sourced applications that perform something like this? Would such a thing be difficult to implement?
So there are still a few issues that need to be addressed before a Microsoft Office-free environment is practical, but it's currently possible with varying degrees of success. Now that the itch is being felt, even among the average user, getting it scratched is a matter of "when", not "if".
The only thing I care about is if my printer will work! It's not worth having the product if I can't print my work.
You mean there is an office suit from Microsoft?
The only problem I have with WP6, is that I can't read files that people send in Word97 format.
I also am not worried about any type of word/excel macro virus. And I don't use outlook!
Fight Spammers!
I've been using Star Office at home for most of a year. I can say that I have yet to have a problem opening ANY Microsoft Office 97 (or older) document, be it Word or Excel. The calendar portion of Star seems to have the same functionality as Outlook, except for the Virus-friendly scripting. There is some scripting support, but I've never investigated it. Who needs it, really?
Sun is getting ready to release Star Office 5.2, from the preview pages it looks good. They claim the M$ Office filters are much improved, and will support Office 2000. I am looking forward to checking it out. If it's as good as they say, I am going to try to convert our office at work to Star Office. We are currently a M$-Only workplace, including Outlook and Exchange, and it really sucks. The "ILOVEYOU" script brought our Exchange server to it's knees for days.
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Wheels of Open Source
Roll onward to help Geeks work
But ease is not there
And this is the big issue with Open Source. We always say 'Man, is Linux going to kick ass in a year or two,' but then we get there and we're still moving in small steps.
Nothing will perfectly import/export Word/Excel files. Especially when they embed one another. We have IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but we can't talk to Exchange systems all that well. Groupware is the Killer App that will make or break Linux's use in Big Business.
Yes, Evolution is coming. We're at version 0.1 though. The framework isn't even complete, the libraries that it uses are still in the Unstable Gnome. As we've said so many times before, it's coming. It's always coming. Always a few months away.
Evolution comes
But as fast as we can run
We still don't advance
I do web development for mid-sized businesses. I have a customer who wants to ftp his Excel spreadsheets to our webserver, then have them displayed/searchable online. We use Linux for our web, and DB servers, and we run Postgres. Without Microsoft monopolizing the desktop market, my company would be out the several hundred/thousand dollars for the time it takes to write a customized program to convert the Excel strings into Postgres strings...
:-) Thanks Bill!
So I want to know who thinks Microsoft is bad?
regards,
Benjamin Carlson
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
I use StarOffice 5.1 for school work on my Libretto 100CT. One of my friends was away from class one day and wanted the notes. I did the Word97 export, and we opened up the file on his Sharp Mebius (running Office 2000).
When we opened the file, what we found was that the line drawings I did (for some small diagrams) were not exported at all. Of course, that kind of thing is not really used by most users anyway, but this is something to keep in mind.
I also can't figure out how to make only *PART* of a page columnized in StarOffice - I have to resort to using tables.
With regards to export to Power Point, here is what I have found in my experience:
When exporting from a presentation which links to images, all the links are converted to embeds, and the end result is one monster file (in comparison to the original file size).
It also doesn't like to export the bullets properly, and fonts are kind of shaky.
Import works a LOT better than export, though.
That said, its only a matter of time before M$ changes file formats to force everyone onto the vicious upgrade cycle of death ("Uh oh, my client just sent me an attchment in MSOffice 2001 format - must pay M$ tax now!") and the current release of StarOffice becomes useless.
Though I heard some rumblings (here on /. - so it must be true) that the new format might be HTML (or XML) based? If so, expect strange new tags to appear in an undocumented way...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Yes, it's official: The average user doesn't know how to use linux. This is your single, biggest challenge. People do not like change. They have used Windows "for X goddamn years, and goddamnit, I'm not going to switch!" I worked tech support for three years. I dealt with thousands upon thousands of callers. I can safely say that less than 1% of them are currently capable of doing anything much beyond logging in. Most would even protest that.
Yes, linux has many alternatives to MS products available but, like most linux offerings, comes up short on UI. Oh, and for those who are already hammering in their replies - I'd like to remind you I've used linux for the past four years, as well as NT, W2K, Windows 98, hell, I've been on computers since the DOS 3.3. So yes, I do know what I'm talking about here. Your average desktop user has the IQ of a lobotomized flatworm.
If you want corporate acceptance of linux, I have two pieces of advice for you: Don't force it, and don't evangelize it. There are alot of reasons for this, but the simplest one is that if you can't show your boss how to use it, you're not going to get it deployed. The other reason is that despite what people say about this industry moving at warp speed, corporations move about as fast as dark molasses in the dead of a minnesota winter. Most corporations don't upgrade until they have to - they have no time for training, IT is usually busy resetting passwords and deleting that #$@! office assistant from the desktop.
You want linux in the workplace? Code it. Use it. Debug it. Repeat. Linux will not get in the door by simply mentioning it... it must win by proving itself superior. We have no marketing department, our sales department is an FTP server in North Carolina and our programming department spans seven continents. Am I getting through?
OK, here's my $0.02....
1. Mail: Exchange servers will generally talk IMAP. I can read my mail from an Exchange server just fine using any IMAP reader. Of course if your company doesn't do it this way you're hosed. A lot of places shut down POP support since it's "insecure" or something...(no more than anything else....)
2. Documents: For 90% of the documents that most people in an office environment use/create/read, etc., they're probably not using any of the 'advanced' features that would normally break compatibility. It's the other 10% who've got all the macros, templates, graphs, OLE links, and undocumented file format features that will have trouble.
3. Presentations: Unfortunately a big hurdle is all the PHB's whose time is spent created powerpoint slide shows to yammer on about at meeting after meeting. Until we get a powerpoint clone that can 100% handle powerpoint files (these are probably the MOST incompatible between versions) then forget it.
Any spreadsheet will work fine for simply formatting data columns and doing simple charting. Any word processor will work fine for the simple letters, memos, etc. etc. But the above issues are where the problem lies.
And watch your productivity soar.
Remember the main business app. (in a brick'en morter) is the main DB, for tracking/billing/inventory ect. You can do that with Interbase (which can run on Linux (OKAY Give m my karma point)) or Oracle. There are non M$ apps out for all the basic functions, Word Processing / Spread Sheets / Email / Browsing / Graphics Programs / CAD. You could do all this with a MAC, Linux (KARMA POINT), Free BSD, a good old fashion Unix box or one of those Java client thingy's.
The problem is not very many people in the buiness enviroment want to "RISK" not using a Winbloze machine without M$ Office. Remember no one ever got fired for using a M$ product ( the companies went belly up instead).
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I'm waiting for Gnome and KDE to be finished. KDE is better overall, but what blew me away was Gnome's Gnumeric, a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been designed by MS without the drawbacks of having been implemented by them!
From my personal experience, StarOffice is very bad in reading .doc documents. From every 5 documents I try StarOffice is hardly reading one. That if you using last versions of Word (which most Windows users do).
AbiWord is much better in this regard, but it doesn't understand tables and many other things, like TOCs, etc. - so what you get is mostly text.
To the other side it's also a bit problematic - Word and StarOffice seem to understand tables, frames, backgrounds etc. differently, which leads to non-nice effects. But never saw StarOffice-produced file that Word can't read - so at least you get your text.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
You want to make business decisions based on an umitigated hatred of another company: Microsoft. That is ridiculous. Why would anyone waste time and resources on such a thing? Don't you have anything better to do?
At my old employer's we used HP-Openmail (running on HP/UX) as a mailserver, and Outlook on the client. This was a very Micro$oft-oriented company, only 2 Linux boxes for 2000 employees, and very "standardized" desktops, where even getting Cygnus Developer's kit was no easy feat. Thus,if HP-Openmail could happen there, I think it won't be a problem in other Micro$oft-centric shops either.
Say no to software patents.
This is a slight side track to the original question but recently I have started to feel strongly that a small alteration to current monopoly law could allow everyone to compete on a level playing field. I have found their to be some misunderstanding as to the purpose of monopoly law, it is not illegal to hold a monopoly but it is illegal to abuse one. I would propose that once a monopoly in an area such as software/operating systems had been established (such as in the current Microsoft case) the company in question should be forced to open it's specifications to file formats, protocols and other proprietary systems that limit interoperability.
If Microsoft were forced to open all it's specifications it be far easier to build an office environment in which other systems played a more crucial role. I personally feel that options currently on the table to deal with Microsoft's abuse of power could adversely affect the software industry in ways that will harm everyone. If instead the kind of forced sharing of information I propose was in place the balance of power would change gradually. Software would appear that could talk to an exchange server alongside server software that outlook is happy communicating with.
I don't want to see MS free offices in favor of some other emerging stronghold of power, instead a rich environment where software from many different sources can be used without serious compatibility issues would be infinitely preferable. For the time being this is just pipe dream I know, but that is no reason not to try.
I've been playing with StarOffice (both 5.1 and 5.2 preview) recently, and it looks to be a good, functional office suite, that converts Word and Excel documents fairly well (still some bugs here). Still, I think that Sun (or anyone else for that matter) has a long way to go before they can unseat Microsoft Office from the workplace.
Asking geeks and the computer savvy to switch office suites is no big deal. We've all had experience learning new software, and are not afraid to have our productivity suffer in the short term, if it means benefits in the long term. The real challenge will be getting everyone else (Mary in HR, Bob the CEO) convinced that switching office suites is a Good Thing.
Most users have a hard enough time switching between different versions of Office, let alone Office to StarOffice (or other). True, the up-and-coming office suites are designed to look and feel like Microsoft Office, but it's the little differences that matter. You can type a regular letter in anything without much trouble: but it's the way things like tables, columns, and other page setups are implemented that tend to confuse the common user. If your average user can't figure out how to perform their important tasks in a new office suite, they'll start crying for the old Office.
How many millions of dollars have been spent training the rank-and-file of businesses around the world to use Microsoft Office products? How many training classes have secretaries been sent to? How many Word for Dummy books placed on their desks? The point is that businesses have invested a lot of time and money to train their people to use Microsoft Office: the decision to switch shouldn't be taken lightly.
But Microsoft has embeded codes, but you just don't see it.
Styles are a start, but sometimes, some people need finer control.
Fight Spammers!
There is a systems out, that does groupware type of functions through a browser.
It already exists, is open source, and is useable if not complete yet.
It can be found here.
It is called TWIG, or "The Web Information Gateway".
It might be a solution, and if more people got involved in it it might go faster, and get developed a bit more quickly.
There is also Zope.
It is a python programming language, and there are , I am sure, ways of duplicating Exchange to Outlook interaction using that.
Just my $.02
First of all, I'm a student, so I don't use Outlook a whole lot. But I do manage to spend a whole lot of time in Linux thanks to StarOffice 5.1.
I used to only change to Windows to play games and do word-processing. I had WordPerfect 8 installed on my machine under Linux, but frankly, it looks like a very, very rushed port of the Windows version. OTOH, StarOffice 5.1 works so well that I can do spreadsheets, documents -- I'm even using it do do certain webpages! I now use Linux almost exclusively, since (unlike WP) StarOffice's MS-Office conversion filters are top-class.
Speaking of email, though, a question does occur to me: wouldn't it be easier to convince your admins/management to simply change to a non-MS mail solution? There is no good reason I can see for sticking with that software (worse efficiency, less scalable, more virii, incompatibilities, etc). If all that's standing in your way is a "All-MS" policy, perhaps it's time to change that policy by pointing out that it makes no *business sense* whatsoever.
Why would a company spend so much money retraining people to use a new OS or office productivity software suite when most people have some experience with Micro$oft products? If a company goes with Micro$soft, they instantly increase their ROI and user satisfaction. Most regular users that you find in the majority of offices don't want to learn a new OS. All they use the computer for is to get simple tasks done, and for them, Office is all they need. For the office I work for, I looked at switching to either Linux or Mac OS due to my frustrations with Win9x, or NT, and I found that I would be spending 25-30% more due to training and support costs. It's just not worth it in my opinion. That's my opinion, take it or leave it!
I have some expierence doing this very thing and I have a low tech way to handle this. Exporting the contact list out of ACT2000 in .CSV (Comma Seperated Variable) format will allow you to import this CVS file back into your newly installed StarOffice spreadsheet program.
Once you have the exported CVS data in a spreadsheet, you can delete the useless and or blank fields and resave it as a .CSV file. Now, in your new contact manager, (taking a moment to map the relavant fields) you can import this data back in and you have all your data in-tact.
I've implemented a special in-house email address so that our users can attach their proprietary list to an email so that the help desk can perform this conversion for them.
Moving forward, we changed our policy to allow people to use whatever contact software they wish, but in order to store this information on the company network, it must be in CVS format. Given this open file format we, as a company, can move forward with software decisions without having to be tied to a proprietary file format.
Given the success of this decision, we're currently looking at other well documented (read:open), data formats that we can ask our network users to use as a compliment to their proprietary file format of choice. This is a good balance between the users demands for useability, and a networks demand to be as open to change as possible.
___
Since most people don't use all of the features of any word processor, i suggest saving every document in an open format, ie RTF. If they need the formatting they can save it in Postscript(pdf).
The makers of OSS office software (ie the gnome and kde desktops and their respective applications) should develop open file formats and pressure other companies to support them.
If people start saving their documents in open file formats _now_ then in perhaps 3 months they can move seamlessly over to another office suite/os.
Personally I always save in open formats, it lets me open my files on my 486 with wordperfect, my m68k mac with Claris Works, my mom's win98 machine, and any other computer I can come across.
I would propose that once a monopoly in an area such as software/operating systems had been established (such as in the current Microsoft case) the company in question should be forced to open it's specifications to file formats, protocols and other proprietary systems that limit interoperability.
Say it again!
The problem I've always had is why is the market not demanding that software companies at least look at a standards spec?
___
Well, right now, I'm using StarOffice and ApplixWare, both running in emulation on NetBSD. Both work well. I have WP8, but it's a little clunky.
WP9/WP2000 *IS NOT LINUX NATIVE*. One person contacted me saying he had a native WP2000, as opposed to WP Office, but Corel denies all knowledge of such a thing, and claims to have no intention of doing Linux-native ports ever again, now that they've got WINE running their software.
I don't really like this. WINE is a cool idea, but shouldn't be replacing real native software.
Anyway, the biggest problem I had was handling change-bars/revisions; no program I tried was able to "correctly" handle MS's change bars. Applix came the closest, but it still wasn't exceptionally usable.
My mom's laptop is using StarOffice now, and has done pretty well at importing whatever files need to be read.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
...from the yahoo articl e:
"When we set up a business, we put in what makes sense. It's about tools and getting the job done. Not about religion."
Always remember (and never forget) this fact. Our primary goal is to make [non-MS solution] make sense for businesses. If my *alternative OS* doesn't support the printer on my desk, or the files people send me, then it does not make sense from a business standpoint to keep throwing my time and money at it.
Personally, I'm not that corporatist, but those are the people we need to be winning over.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
One of the biggest problems, however, is the fact that learning a computer takes a lot more time and is done at an older age than learning to walk or potty training. Driving is also pretty much a neural activity.
In other words, nothing you stated requires a college course.
Computers have yet to become that good. I mean, a lot of people get confused with a VCR, much less a computer.
I have experienced this rather sad elitism myself, on a different level. I occupy what I call a "middle tier" of programmer--one who has a good working knowledge of high-level languages such as CFML, VBScript, and SQL, but has a lot of trouble dealing with lower level ones like C+ and Java.
Another big problem is that the higher up on the "elite knowledge food chain" you are, the harder it seems to be to communicate with those in need of training. I have found that the commercial products like Microsoft and Allaire have better documentation and teaching tools than anything from the open source movement.
Thus, I think there is merit in comments about usability and seeing the corporate view as a whole before undertaking a quest to remove Office from the workplace.
Ultimately, the goal of computers are to be used as tools for the masses to business, entertainment, education, and research. Our ultimate goal is for them to be used by as many people as possible. That involves making them easy to use, and not just reserved for a select few members of a cyber-intellegensia.
We should never forget that.
Our biggest hurdle is compatibility. We need to be able to use PowerPoint files, etc. But where are we going to be in 6 months from now?
- Gnumeric has support for loading Excel files.
- Evolution will support calendar collaboration. This way a whole group of people can share a calendar. What would make it even better? If Evolution would read Outlook calendars and share those too.
- I think that StarOffice has some support for the Word format, but I am not too sure.
- Powerpoint competitor? How does KPresenter sound? KPresenter is the KOffice's presentation application...and it isn't half bad actually!
That's just the beginning. I think that in a year from now, we'll be much closer to the Microsoft-free Office.
It's not so much a training issue as a file format issue. Any MS Office user can use StarOffice with almost no learning curve for most of the doucuments that are produced. Some advanced features may be missing or implemented differently, but people who just need to create memos, spreadsheets, or basic presentations will be more upset by the fact that it's different than they'll be appeased by the fact that those differences are minor.
We evaluated StarOffice a few months ago and found that the UI similarities to MSOffice were a major plus. The import/export limitations and Sun's lack of marketing and support were the show-stoppers. You can't even get documentation for the StarBasic scripting language.
Yes, most users do things by rote and have a limited understanding about what they're doing, But the UI is so similar that this is not the real problem.
As far as logging in, if you use NT on your clients, then there is no essential difference. We mostly use Win9x, but network resources are unavailable unless the user logs in. So requiring a login is not too big a step. We will eventually move to NT/W2K clients anyway, so we'll have to handle this sooner or later.
Every organization is different, but most of our users spend all day using Office apps to do things that StarOffice could do, on any platform. We have Exchange, but we barely use its workgroup features. If StarOffice can share calenders and contact databases, we could do without MSOffice. YMMV.
AFAIK Corel Word Perfect Office 2000 is
in fact "native".
Wine has two ways of operating:
1. The way most people know of, running as an emulator.
2. Operating as a library for native compilation
of programs originally written for the win32 api.
The whole point of wine, isn't point 1. That
is just sort of a side effect.
Wine is written as an API to act as a drop
in replacement for MS's closed source win32-api.
Corel has modified their officesuite to allow
for native compilation with the wine libraries.
If someone creates a program for the wine-api
instead of the original win32-api, the application
should work on windows, and all platforms with
the winelib available.
It will be Linuxnative, and Wine will be more
like GTK and QT, than an emulator.
I really do wish that StarOffice would fully replace MS Office, but the reality is unfortunate: At this time, there is not enough compatibility. Just often enough, files get munged in the translation process and certain MS Word features like revision editing (which is a heavily used feature) simply doesn't exist in StarOffice.
I personally used StarOffice to author my book. I did all the first drafts with it, exported to MS Word format, and sent it off to my editor. Unfortunately, when I received the document back from my editors, I had to use my wife's Mac with MS Office on it in order to continue working on the documents because they used revision editing.
For the time being, I think StarOffice is great for people who need occational MS Word document support. (e.g. engineers/developers, etc.) but is not enough for full time administrative folk who regularly exchange documents with others who use MS Office... So feed the Symantec family and keep your virus defs up to date...
this is the article you want.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
We looked at StarOffice after looking at the cost of upgrading to Office2000. Nobody likes to spend money unnecessarily, so we looked around.
There were issues that prevented us from switching to StarOffice, but anyone who does not even look around for ways to cut costs is fiscally irresponsible.
For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
We are a Linux/Unix SW development, service and support company located in Vienna, Austria and we have very good experience in running our office entirely on Linux.
At our place there are currently about 25 Linux systems running, six of them are desktop workstations, the rest are servers, routers and development machines. We have a HP4000 laser printer, ISDN fax modems running together with HylaFax, and a HP ScanJet 4c to import the few remaining pieces of paper at our office.
Our desktop systems are all diskless (this is one of our own products, the "xS+S Diskless Client") and Linux proves to be a very fast, reliable and very easy to use desktop OS!
Before she joined us, our secretary was used to the usual MS software, but quickly and without problem she got used to KDE, StarOffice, Gimp and Netscape (the rest of us were Linux freaks already, so I think we don't count... :-)
We have no compatibility problems with StarOffice and the MS Office world. So far, every Word or Excel document we got from customers we could read quite fine, and if customers insist on getting Word documents back, we'll give them what they want just by "Saving as..." in StarOffice :-)
With the upcoming Linux ports of important software like FrameMaker and CorelDraw I think Linux will be a very interesting alternative desktop OS for even a more wider range of users (not just technical, but all the typical office users out there!), and even more when running on Diskless Clients :-)
HTHAndreas
http://www.xss.co.at/
Most of mine can't even figure that out. They either hit cancel (luv that WIn 9x security) or keep trying to use their password with the last guy's user id that's still in the box, thereby locking him out. I also liked the guy who wasn't logging in because "that isn't my name there". Didja ever thing of, maybe, TYPING YOURS IN? DID YOU EXPECT THE COMPUTER TO START RECOGNIZING YOUR FACE????
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Most of the secretaries in the companies request a MS Office training because it is the only thing they know and that's where the pain starts. The boss uses then Office, and so do the employees.
If the training was done with another office package things would look different. Say : Training on Staroffice, the boss would use it, and the employees also....
For communicating with the outside world, you would use a "neutral" format : RTF, CSV, PDF, etc. conversion could be automated....
This is difficult to achieve, but you have to start somewhere !
For those that don't know, a couple of months after anouncing a Linux port for OpenMail, HP announced they were moving to Exchange internally. Kinda kills Openmail's credibility doesn't it? BTW, I reckon Openmail is great. We stopped the ILOVEYOU virus in its tracks within minutes of finding out about it. Not so with Exchange I bet...
There are a couple of points I'd like to bring up. The mose important thing is getting the job done, at a reasonable cost.
Now, If I can move my entire infrastructure over to something like star office (Which, when not used as a Office-compatable package, is pretty damn great... But the MSO compatability sucks.), Then this has to be done in a complete fashion.( no office holdouts...)
However, If I'm switching to say Corel office or some other closed source alternative to MSO, what's the fsking point? It does not help to switch to another comercial package I would say.
I guess being anti-microsoft for the sake of being isn't terribly smart in my opinion.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again : Theres nothing like being redundant.
Hello,
I have found that the only office suite that can
accurately import and export Word/Excel is WP2000.
The others can do it but they always have errors at some level. The only problem I have ever run into is Quattro Pro does not always get the fonts correct.
Applix, StarOffice, KOffice, AbiWord are all good products (o.k. maybe not StarOffice) but they can not compete in terms of "Compatibility".
It is unfortunate that we have "YET" to produce an OpenSource Office Suite that can compete with the likes of WP2000 and MS Office.
I like WP2000 ALOT, but the Linux version is pretty sad and unless you are running a 500MHZ with a lot of ram, pretty useless except for the
simplest of processing.
I digress
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
No matter how good your non-MS tools and apps are, there is one thing they will always lack: compatibility. Sure, StarOffice is file-compatible with Office 97, but only now will they release a new version with Office 2000 compatibility. Meaning, the non-MS apps are lagging behind MS!! They react to what MS does. Good grief, even the StarOffice "desktop" looks exactly like the one from a very well known so-called "operating system". So, the key here, is critical mass. When there are enough users out there supporting some kind of open file standard (can anybody spell XML?) , maybe MS is forced to support it too.
"Some people see things as they are, and ask why. I dream things that never were, and ask why not."
To whit: documents generated using Word 2000 and saved in MS Word 95/6.0 RTF may not be useable with Word 95/6.0 because of add-ons to the RTF "language"... I hesitate to call it a language, really because it's just one big ugly spec that keeps getting added to (e.g., Word 2000 prints out table definitions at both the beginning and the end of a row "to maintain compatibility" with readers that expect it at one end or the other - all the while breaking readers that don't expect it at the end).
Sorry, I'm writing a document conversion/creation app right now that is due in one week and is just a tad frustrating because of this very reason. To the point...
What we need are open source document formats that can be implemented relatively easily (look at XML, it's the way to go) and will not allow companies like MS to bastardize them with implementation-specific "features". (again, look at what MS is doing with their Word2000-generated "HTML" docs. If they're displayable in anything other than IE5, I'll be highly surprised)
Calendar and task sharing is not difficult when you have your organizer built-in to your email client. This isn't an ideal solution though, because your organizer and email client should be separate, IMHO. Why not have a centralized organizer/planner running that other applications can communicate with via CORBA or some other communications scheme? Hell, you could bundle it into the OS and beat MS at their own game.
Now I must play Unreal Tournament and cleanse my mind of these foibles.
"He treats objects like women, man!"
- The Dude, The Big Lebowski
The problem with this is that none of the current alternatives have open file formats either. So sooner or later, you'll get locked into a single vendor again.
As many have pointed out already, the Word suite is overkill for most work in most offices. But the extra flab usually doesn't work for the rest of the users -- it mostly just adds to the instability of the product. Here's some made-up statistics (what fun is /. if you can't make up statistics? :-)). 90% of office word processing is basic enough that they don't need anything beyond WordPerfect 4, and maybe 80% could be done just fine in WordPad. (There was a time when *100%* of office word processing was done in WP4 and comparable systems. Remember? Was it really that horrible back then?) Maybe 9% of office word processing is so involved that it would be better off with a serious application like PageMaker or even TeX. That leaves about 1% of uses where Microsoft Word strikes the right balance between simplicity and power. In return for serving that 1%, everybody else has to put up with clogging their RAM, losing half a gig of their hard drive, having to buy bigger and faster hardware every two years, well-timed BSODs, and security holes that can cripple you for days. (Remember macro viruses?)
Security is one of the things I'd worry about the most. Microsoft likes to make important decisions on behalf of its customers (Which is more important, decent international character support or dancing paperclips?) Unfortunately, they usually make the wrong ones, and then don't bother telling anybody about the consequences. The attitude seems to be "You poor users are too dumb to understand the trade-offs between the convenience of automatically starting a program from your mailbox and the dangers of having your hard drive wiped out by a virus. Let us worry about those trade-offs for you." I don't care if it's done by Microsoft or by someone else, but the sooner we get a popular office suite that's not built on that attitude, the better.
What the world needs now is XML!! We shouldnt be pushing toward getting keeping up with microsoft and even if we can they keep changing the rules! RTF and more open standards help, but will not give us full functionally. If we get enough platforms to follow us microsoft will have to follow us!
- Completely GUI configuration, no scripts or text files to edit
- Use ISP/hosting service mail servers simply by entering POP and SMTP servers in the preferences
- critically importanthandle multiple email accounts from multiple servers and domains
- Be able to switch email accounts without quitting the program. Eudora for windows or mac can use multiple accounts but you have to quit and start it up with a different config file
- Able to select the "From:" address with a popup menu (and have the right SMTP server used)? This is particularly important to be able to do in replies when I want to reply from a different address than it was sent to
- No configuration of sendmail or any other mail software on my linux box required.
- Arbitrary and unlimited numbers of mail filters, that sort into:
- Unlimited numbers of mailboxes
- Scales to handle tens of thousand of letters in a mailbox, with the ability to search various ways (both in headers and body text) and to sort by header fields
Both Mail-It and Postmaster for the BeOS can do this, and for that reason I use the BeOS when I do my full mail download; most of the time when I read my mail I use elm on linux at my web hosting service Seagull Networks (one of the few web hosts which doesn't just allow shell accounts, but ssh - secure shell access).KMail with KDE lets you use POP and SMTP providers but only works with one account.
If anyone knows of a good mail client that will serve my needs as described on Linux I will gladly switch.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The question isn't can it be done but how to do it.
In that reguard you must accept that in some areas Linux will not be welcomed.
Moving from Windows to Linux means trainning every single user in an advanced system and this may not be a good idea. On the other hand it may also be an exelent idea. It depends on the office.
Linux won't give a cooshy move.
On the other hand can it be done? Quite simply yes it can...
In complexity (and in many cases unwarented complexity) Windows 3.11 at times is more complex than Linux. Unless a program contains it's own install pacage the user is left with installing software by hand.. or just running it by hand.
Yet it was Windows 3.11 not the later (and far easyer) 95 that took over the office. In many cases giving way to Dos and Unix only for Networking. Thus Windows for workgroups closed this problem.
Becouse Win 3.11 required significent skill Mac was where Linux is.. feeding the market an alternitive holding ground where Microsoft fails.
A better solution might be a mix of systems rather than just one system....
Linux boxes for the advanced functions and Macs as data entry points. Mac unlike Windows talks to Unix with no effort. Allways has. Linux suports AppleTalk just to make things easyer.
Thies two platforms do not present anywhere near the problems issued by trying to make Linux or Mac talk with Windows.
Now for the fun part. Mac allready runs Microsoft office and Linux would be in areas where Microsoft compatability isn't an issue.
There should be no reason to use an all Linux system other than fears over mixing platforms.
Mac dosn't go out of it's way to create problems. Nither dose Linux.
You can also safely thrown in some BSD and Solarus boxes and not be affrade.
Each has it's technical issues it's technical ups and technical downs...
Mix and match...
There is no real need for a totally Linux solution...
It can be done but it's the hard answer...
I don't actually exist.
wolruf@gmail.com
There is a laundry list of advanced features which create problems, but for my money VBA seems especially problematic. When you create custom functions in Excel, the VBA code can become the essential part of what the spreadsheet is doing. True, most users don't use VBA. But if there's any chance you'll need VBA compatability, you're going to stick with MS Office.
Is there any chance at all of getting VBA compatability in Star Office or the Gnome suite? Is anyone working on it? I assume there are thorny technical issues.
I work for an IT company in Brussels, Belgium. We mostly use MS systems, although we have a few Unix (various flavors) servers in operation. All the office work is done with MS software.
I found myself in trouble when my laptop died and I had to use coworkers' computers to read my mail : I had to configure Outlook to access my account on the exchange server every time I used someone else's laptop.
The administrator configured an extra server, running Outlook Web Access. Now I can just type the server's url on the intranet and I get a decent outlook-like interface under Netscape. Which means I will be able to read my exchange mail and access other exchange data from Linux, when my new laptop ships.
OK, it's not a real solution, but it can help switching to another Office suite and keeping that damn exchange server.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
It would seem to be only 2/3 of a solution to have one office suite replace another. We would still have a situation where certain users would be unable to play if that particular software weren't available for their platform, with Star and Mac OS as an example. Nothing will really change until open standards are adopted for these types of documents.
- "I feel like using program X for a change"
- Thou Shalt Use No Other Program But Me
I mean, come _on_... can we have a little perspective here? We are talking about lock-in and single-sourcedness so intense that most people will say making choice is IMPOSSIBLE, if not MORALLY wrong even- and people are using "religion" to describe the _alternative_?What is so hard about establishing relationships with people and negotiating this sort of thing to establish means of doing business that are not so single-sourced?
I am lucky enough to work at a company where enlightened people make the decisions on the software chosen for servers/desktops. This was the case right from the start (the company is only a year old). So we have about 7 servers/routers running Linux, and 6 desktops running Linux. Then there are about 8 Mac desktops/laptops running MacOS. So we're very close to being MS-free! I believe that MS Office apps are still used for managing paycheques and the like.
:)
We also need to test our web stuff using IE on the Macs. IE 5.5 on Mac is a surprisingly standards compliant browser. Since we also need to test with IE in Windows, one of the Linux desktops runs VMWare. It is obviously much easier to stay MS-Free when you are a young company. All new people hired into the Engineering Dept. are expected to know Linux. If they don't and somehow get hired, they probably wouldn't last long.
"Is The Microsoft-Free Office Possible?"
Sure, all you need to do is borrow the MS Office CD from someone, and then pop a blank in your CD-R... Oh wait, that's not what you meant. Never mind.
Microsoft did not become big because they were compatible with the rest out there. They got big because at some point they had a critical mass of software which integrated nicely. After that it became the default choice of software.
To achieve something similar on linux it is not enough to be compatible. Compatibility is of course important but I think it is more important to offer users a consistent environment to do their work in. Linux is just too customizable. It looks and feels different on nearly each desktop. That's not good if you have an office full of non techie people who need to work with the software.
The nice thing about operating systems like mac OS and windows is that after installation, both operating systems look fairly similar from machine to machine. That makes it easy to administer and use them.
It's not good enough to just copy the features available. Arguably most mac/windows features are already available on linux. They're just not organized enough.
Jilles
For most companies, the cost of retraining users, etc, is MUCH higher than the cost of a copy of Microsoft Office. Ever heard of the concept of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)? It is the main reason that StarOffice is not deployed in more places. Yes, SO is free, but the TCO of SO is *much* higher in terms of training, etc than MS Office.
But BeOS with Gobe Productive is pretty darn good.
My wife has been used to using Word/Publisher for a while now. I finally found drivers for linux for my printer (damn HP PPA printers, I knew I should never have bought one), which is the only reason we run Windows in our home. Now that I can print from Linux, I officially wiped Microsoft products from our home. And my wife HATED me for about a week. But, as I taught her the right way, about how the user interface of a linux-based desktop system FAR outpowers the limited Windows UI, and how it's fully modular and customizable per-user (I had her use FVWM95 for a while, while slowly 'tweaking' behind the scenes to wean her off that UI), she began to 'see the light'. Now she will not use Windows, and is even trying to get her shackled office-mates to switch, bragging about her home computing platform. And the sex is way better now, save for a few 'oh, LINUS' screams every once in a while :) j/k And we saved several thousand dollars in counseling!
Some companies here in Denmark have decided to make the switch away from Microsoft. The clearest example is a major oil company (Q8) who are replacing their 130 desktops to run Linux and StarOffice, expecting significant support and upgrade savings.
The headline seems to be misleading, taking the stance that no MS in the office includes removing Windows. Most of the quotes seemed to focus on just being able to exist without MS-Office (presumably to cut down on security hazards or vicoious upgrade cycles). NO big surprise, really.
There are windows-based non-MS solutions. Howabout Lotus for crissakes? We're stuck with Windows on the desktop at work, but we use a Notes - Smartsuite solution for work, and we seem able to get by just fine. No e-mail viruses, no major compatibility problems. No need for MS Office. The only concession is the (free) MS Word viewer that I keep for those occasional documents that don't come through. That, or a polite phone-call to the document creator to send in RTF or something if there is a problem.
No MS-Office, and work seems to get done just fine. It's important to remeber that Windows != MS-Office, and that there are other solutions out there. Also !(MS-Office) <> Linux. Think outside the box, kids.
--sugarman--
Well, if you want to avoid an MS-based office, you basically have a handful of options.
Option one: Set up Linux workstations (or Solaris, or whatever). Install StarOffice, Applixware, or WordPerfect (if you're using Linux). Teach your users the basics of operating in a Unix environment, and build their login environment to be as simple as possible. Then accept the limitations you'll face on peripheral usage, software, compatibility, etc. There are workarounds for a lot of it.
Option two: Buy a whole load of Macs. Use AppleWorks, Netscape, and Eudora as your operating environment. Apple's stopped including Office translators, though, so you'll have to buy them from Dataviz. There used to be other options on the Mac, but Office steamrolled Lotus and Corel right out of the ballgame. Office has a higher competitive marketshare on the Mac than it has on Windows even - because there's no high-end competition. StarOffice is supposed to be on the way now, though.
That all said, it's not necessarily practical to go MS-free. For the most part, Office on Windows is the easiest, most practical way for the average office drone to get things done. It's bloated, granted, and it comes from Shub-Redmond, but it still works quite well for what it is. If you also put your users on NT (not servers, mind you, but users), you have enough tools to lock the systems down sufficiently to keep the users out of trouble and still let them think they control their systems.
Where it is easy and practical to go MS-free is in the back end. NetWare is still the slickest file & print server out there, and their directory services work real well and give you nice admin tools that can control systems across platforms. Linux, xBSD, or Solaris all also run well on the back end, and are tremendously robust and flexible. Not as easy to administer as NetWare, and without the cross-platform (Windows included) directory tools, but a viable option. Exchange is easy to replace - you can use Notes, GroupWise, or a Unix-based system like OpenMail. Presto. Eliminating Exchange/Outlook has just rendered you significantly less vulnerable to nasty virii and worms that plague Windows users. Besides that, you can easily avoid running Microsoft databases - Oracle, Sybase, Informix, or a host of others run very well, cross-platform, and have all sorts of development tools available.
Basically, it's easy to ditch MS for a lot of applications, but Windows probably makes more sense today for the average office worker. Ask this question again in a year, and there's a real good chance my answer will be different.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I would love if the choice would allow me (and others) to choose to use linux instead of windows. I know that linux is not yet ready to replace the OS in the dumb user's desktops. But I do think it's ready to replace my desktop (I would only add a fault here in the printing side that must be reviewed, I am hoping that the gnome-print will bring some ligth into this area).
But the point is that I want to use linux, I fell 1000 time more confortable and more produtive with linux+gnome that in any windows machine. But many business dumbly chooses their software based in the recomendation of the MSCE guy. And then their emploees don't have the chance to choose. And in my opinion this is the gratest problem.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Our PowerPoint replacement: an overhead(tm) projector, with pen and acetate. This innovative platform-independent solution interoperates with all major OS's. Extensive research has shown that Powerpoint users don't understand the difference between serif and sans serif, or why proportional fonts don't need two spaces after a full stop. We have concluded from this that graphics software is superfluous to requirements for this group of users. Our new solution is fantastic for charts and diagrams. Time-to-presentation is slashed, and productivity maximised. We only wish we made the change sooner.
People have been posting some insightful comments, many of which seem to be emphasizing the difficulty of convincing the boss, the HR people, etc... to convert to a different kind of software.
But everybody seems to have forgotten the most compelling factor as far as I think most small businesses would be concerned-- the price tag. Linux replacements for MS Office are FREE!
Large corporations have got to be spending six to seven figures on MS Office, so it must be a convincing factor for them too.
Frankly, as good as Star Office might be, I won't be comfortable using _my_ pitch to a boss until the Helix Code stuff is finished and solid.... but other people will certainly disagree.
It sounds like a little bit of heaven right here on earth.
___
Management sees a few strong reasons for remaining a Microsoft based office, among which are:
Here's the rub: It's an endless cycle. If you count on the fact that you've already trained your employees, it makes little sense EVER to change to a new platform, even if it's very similar to what they're using now. If you rely on the fact that you don't want to destroy your investment in MS products by switching already, you'll never make that switch either. If you count on the fact that new employees are MS Office savvy, then you have to wait for the majority of other companies to make the switch before it makes sense for you. Sadly, many other companies are waiting based on the same skewed premise. If everyone waits for the "other guys" to change, can it ever change?
That's the single biggest hurdle I see for a non-MS office to overcome, and why MS will remain a strong part of American business for a good few years yet.
-Jer
We are a New York city/Long Island based Web Hosting, Development and networking company and we are 99% Microsoft Free. :) I don't know of any software for Linux or UNIX that works with Lotus, but then again, I think Domino sucks anyway..(that's just my opinion)
It's REALLY not that hard.Star Office is good for almost anything but Word2000, but I believe WordPerfect for Linux converts Office 2000 docs.
We have the obligatory NT dedicated servers for our clients, and a Mac for Graphic work, everything else is Linux (or BSD)
It took the Microsoft apologists a little time to realize that they didnt have to suckle from
MS's teat anymore, but al in all, everyone is happier, works better and less stressed
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Thanks! I hadn't thought about doing it on his box before he uploads it... I suppose that wouldn't be too tough...also I could write it to auto upload, and remove/convert things Postgres doesn't like...
:o)
I'll have to see if he is willing to let us do this...
also have to see if my guys are willing to write an app for windows!
regards,
Benjamin Carlson
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
StarOffice Windows
Desktop changed, start menu whacked
App? No, new OS.
I happen to know that the largest newspaper company in our country runs NeXT boxen. They chose them when they computerized their workplaces, probably because of user-friendliness and powerful hardware at the time. Now they are thinking about moving to linux, which means 300+ linux workstations running staroffice and some of their in-house software. I know that because i'm trying to get some of those nice black NeXT boxen when they'll throw them out ... It's a piece of history.
Did you have a look at the recent KDE 2.0 beta or a recent KDE 2.0 CVS snapshot? [If you haven't, download from kde.org or get Red Hat Linux binaries here]
Anyone who looks at it anywhere near objectively will notice that anyone who has used Windows can deal with it - the interfaces are similar, and as far as differences are concerned, KDE 2.0 wins in usability.
Something similar can be said about GNOME 1.2, which just needs some more time to get all the functionality implemented.
Red Hat Linux 7.0 will (probably) have an autologin feature for people who don't want to get used to the login process, and other distributions will probably follow.
KOffice (obviously) integrates perfectly with KDE - even StarOffice adds itself to the KDE menus so even the most stupid user can find it. Both of them can read M$-Office files, so converting old documents shouldn't be much of a problem.
I doubt a stupid user could tell the difference between a Windows system and a KDE 2 system that has been configured to look like Windows.
I agree about the "Code it. Use it. Debug it." part though - we need to demonstrate that we are not just a viable alternative, but the better one - if people don't care about reliablity, efficiency and speed, it's not as easy on the desktop as on servers...
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Linux is just too customizable. It looks and feels different on nearly each desktop. That's not good if you have an office full of non techie people who need to work with the software.
I've seen this argument way too many times, and it is just plain wrong. customizeability is not a bad thing. i don't know about mac, but windows can also be customized to the point that no one else would be able to use it if one wants to. i have been in a company where my entire department used linux, including about half a dozen people who had little to no experience using administering linux. there is always a default setup for a linux system. at my company it was debian and windowmaker (the sysadmin being a big windowmaker fan and a debian user) as long as there is somebody there who knows how to administer and provide support for this default setup that's all you need. He just made it clear that anyone who chose to use something else as their setup had to be able to admin their own boxes. of course this was long enough ago that anyone who knew how to setup and customize their own box was probably very well capable of administering it themselves, but at any rate, there were only two of us in the department that chose to use a different setup, both of us preferring redhat over debian.
at any rate, your problem of linux being "too customizable" is not a problem at all. as long as someone chooses a standard install and makes sure that everyone who wants to depart from that standard knows that they are on their own, people who dont know what they are doing will be able to get plenty of support.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Mounting is built in to most Linux desktop environments. Works pretty much like the Macintosh, BTW, which is geared to ease of use, and, also BTW, is based on the basic premise of "mounting" removable media.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
We are visual beings and that means the GUI's are the rule and while I know that there are many who drool over the command line (and maybe some who are truly bent and dream of the return of that retarded Edlin) the truth is that for many using the computer is not so involved with the SYSTEM as it is with using Excel/Word/Outlook and going home to have a LIFE outside of computers. Scary, ain't it, that some people want to do something other than 'hack the kernel' or play Quake till they drop?
I bet users (and I.Q. has nothing to do with it) will learn more about computers about the same time that geeks learn social skills and the joy of interacting with live people rather than trying to look up Lara Croft's undies.
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Word 95 users can't import Word 2000 documents either.
So using Microsoft isn't the solution to all your compatibility problems. You also have to use the very latest version of Microsoft. Still, people shouldn't feel so embarassed about requesting a different format. Business partners ought really to be impressed if you reply to their email with, "We don't use Microsoft software since the security scares - could you save it as whatever and send it to me again?".
I've considered advising some clients to switch over to Linux + StarOffice, but the main thing that makes me hesitate is the printing. None of their printers are Postscript, and the overhead of running GhostScript for every print job would, I think, be excessive. They do a lot of printing, and their machines aren't all Pentiums yet.
Also, I suspect that persuading SO & Ghostscript to do things like printing from the right paper/envelope tray at the right time would not be much fun.
Still, doing these things in Unix is getting much better very quickly. My wife still uses "LaTeX" as a swear word since we used it to produce her thesis a few years ago...
Consider this simple principle of UI design I try to use: when a window or dialog opens, the user should be able to just start typing without having to click anywhere. This is for the case where there is some normal common choice for the normal place you'd want to start typing - but in many linux apps, there is no text entry selected anywhere when a window opens.
If you want to see nice UI look and feel, don't look to windows, don't look to mac, look to the BeOS. If Linux had the integration and ease of installation of the BeOS it would crush Microsoft and Bill Gates would be licking the penguin poo from Linus' bootheels.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
StarOffice is pretty darned good for what it is. The applications within the suite seem to play reasonably nice with one another, and configuring printing and mail preferences was reasonably quick. The main problem is that it doesn't have sufficient compatibility with Weird to do joint document development across platforms. I do a lot of joint development, where several people contribute to the development of a single document. When trading documents between Office and Weird, some of the style information in each direction. Worse, Ofice seems not to be able to handle the annotation and correction features of Weird (IMHO a wonderful feature that almost makes up for the rest of the hassles in Weird).
I really dislike StarOffice's strategy of putting everything in a miniature-desktop window. It works, but the user interface is clunky and completely different than the more sane KDE and Gnome worlds.
StarOffice also stores its documents in non human readable format. This is almost inexcusable in today's world of XML and multigigabyte disks, but doesn't affect the suite per se. It just makes it harder to get under the hood and fix-up your documents in (e.g.) emacs.
The bottom line is that Staroffice is serviceable for most things, and might even work well as an overall office suite in a shop full of unix-heads. It is good enough to interoperate with the entrenched M$ products on a level of sharing file attachments for review, but not quite congruent enough with Weird to allow joint document development.
Applixware was a total wash for me. Lots of interesting ideas, but poor implementation in 5.0. I hope that they do significantly better in 5.2. While the word processor, drawing program, presenter, and mail program all seem to work reasonably well, the interfaces are not clearly thought through (for example, it's very tedious to make a reduced-size superscript in the word processor; superscripts are common enough for footnotes, exponentiation, etc. that this should be easy). Further, there are lots of hidden glitches in the code. For example, the mailer apparently uses the shell as glue for the sendmail program; addresses with <focus brokets> cause mail to vanish silently with a single-line error message to the stdout of the applixware process.
The worst of it is that the conversion routines into and out of Applixware do not work at better than an alpha-test level. M$ Weird documents with pictures or more than a minor level of formatting cause the Applixware import filter to format the document in strange ways or to hang and spin indefinitely.
I have not yet figured out how to keep Applixware's watchdog process from stealing new mail out of my mail spool (I'd rather keep my incoming mail in emacs vmail), so I run Applix as little as possible and hope that nothing arrives while I"m working.
Good ideas in Applixware include their integration with the existing X environment and their use of human-readable file formats.
I haven't tried most of the features that were new in 5.0. I wish they had concentrated more on making all the old stuff work right. As it is, they've got a rather nice looking toy, but I wouldn't want to try doing any work with it. There's potential for future releases, but only if they start really polishing details rather than expanding into new features.
Domino for Linux does exist!
Anything is possible.
The problem is that any set of tools serving the same purpose as Microsoft Office would be very similar to Microsoft Office. Microsoft's marketing and desktop dominance isn't the only thing that makes Mircosoft Office so abundant in office environments. The main reason, in my opinion, is that the technologists at most organizations don't want anything else. If the program leaves anything up to the user, like any good tool does, other than minute details, that leaves more room for error on the part of the user, resulting in more work for the technologist. Who want's to work more than he has to? Not me. That's for damn sure.
I plan to own a few businesses in my lifetime, and I have pondered running 'dumb' tools on the office computers. It isn't cost effective. Although, I do plan to offer such an alternative to my workers, after they illustrate thier capabilities. The only way an office can use 'dumb' tools is if the workers are competant and have a desire to use such tools.
Note: I use the term 'dumb' to describe tools that don't attempt to be smart. They leave the configuration and such to the user. (dumb is good)
--Drew Vogel
...is a UNIX environment on Win32, not a Win32 environment for Linux, as the article states. Since the source for this tidbit is a Red Hat spokesman, and Red Hat now owns Cygnus, I would assume that the mistake was on the interviewer's part.
Cygwin homepage
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
One office suite I'm waiting for is KOffice.. it shows alot of potential. The only problem they're facing now is lack of developers on some of the programs, such as KWord. It's all native to linux, all open source, all fast and efficient. What more could you ask for?
-- We should kill all the intolerant people in the world.
I realize that it is not free which will of course cause most linux bible thumpers to scoff at even the idea. However it seems to be a very good version of office and runs pretty well.(provided you have the script update) You need to be able to impress boss with ease of use. This one works that way. And it is damn well cheaper than M$ office.
"Freeing yourself from Microsoft-based PCs on the desktop is difficult to do. It's not practical. Just try to find a non-Microsoft PC when you walk into a computer store today. It's not easy."
Funny, I just turn my head left when I walk into CompUSA, and there are all these funny-looking things called Macintoshes.
Granted, I would probably have to use Office on them for any real office work, since Corel no longer "officially" supports WordPerfect on Mac OS. I don't even know if there's been a new version since 3.5, released around 3-5 years ago.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
I'm working in a lab -- a scientific environment where NT and Office are used almost exclusively. It's not your average business office, I admit it, but I think it would be really hard to throw Office out of there. In the 90s', people here switched from Suns and LaTeX to cheaper and easier-to-use PCs with NT, Office, and ScientificWord for the TeX work. I'm trying to push for some Linux workstations to provide users with a choice, but the question of scientific office software is highly relevant here (yes, even graduate students in physics use Excel to draw plots these days). I've come to use at home a combination of software that do everything I want to be done -- but that does not include e-mailing, sorry. I use mainly KLyX/LyX for redaction (which is an almost-WYSIWYG interface for LaTeX) and Canvas7 for drawings, along with StarOffice for compatibility with MSOffice. StarOffice sometimes has better Office-docs-opening capabilities that MSOffice itself (I once was able to open an print a .doc file which was corrupted and un-printable in NT). There is still problems with StarOffice compatibility when it comes to drawings and equations, but I suppose this will go away as new versions of StarOffice come out. I would be interested to know what other people do or would do (what software they use) in a scientific environment that has been "corrupted" by MSOffice.
IBM's workgroup printers have a wide array of UNIX support, including a driver for Linux. The Linux driver currently reqires you to install lpr:ng, gtk, and a few perl modules. IBM also has automated set up programs and drivers for HP/UX, SCO, Solaris and (of course) AIX. Their web page is at http://www.printers.ibm.com.
Of course, all the drivers there, like most UNIX drivers, meerly munge a datastream to take advantage of specific printer features. The state of UNIX printing still requires a considerable amount of work before it is on par with more modern operating systems which render to a graphics language through a specific printer API. Linux will eventually need something like that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The total cost of ownership includes these things and more:
- Original purchase price
- Price of upgrades
- Price of original installation
- Price of installing upgrades - including labor and document conversion
- Cost of training users
- Cost of training users to use upgrades
- Cost of downtime due to bugs
- Cost of technical support
- Cost of lost business due to bugs (can run into millions of $)
The total cost of ownership is where Microsoft has the greatest strength. There may be cases where Linux and free software has an advantage, but I'm pretty sure the perception is that Microsoft software is actually cheaper than free software and I think that may actually be the reality when the whole integrated system is taken into account.After all, if the cost of retail purchase is an issue the business owner can easily download the software from one of the many warez sites on the web, and many use pirated Microsoft software rather than use Linux and GPL'ed software legitimately.
Look at what the other side provides:
- A large pool of already-trained users (many trained in our public educational system)
- Certified engineers
- Easy-to-find solutions (retail stores, ecommerce, vars, consultants)
- Low-cost and free technical support for many items
- "For Dummies" books
What I would suggest any free software author do when they're getting a release ready is to contact each of the many free software support businesses and ask them to support your package as part of their business - so they can provide bug fixes, user training and assistance. Don't skimp on the documentation and also take the time to write a training manual, or get someone to write one for you.I also suggest including a list of consultants who will provide support for your program, either for free or for pay, along with your distribution and on your website.
Don't make the assumption that someone using your product can build it from source, read a man page, write a shell script or memorize command line options. If you write a command line program and you don't like GUI, find someone who does to write a GUI interface for your command line tool - and make sure they work well together
Remember that the words "free software" do not send the message "inexpensive" to a businessman; more like "cheap" and "low quality", like that Matisse you passed up at the garage sale because it was priced at a buck fifty.
Rather than emphasizing that linux and its applications are free, emphasize that they come with source code that may be freely modified so that technical support and bug fixes may be readily obtained from anyone.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Which proves that no matter how much a zealot pushes dogma on people who don't know any better (i.e., the owner), the people who have to use the software every day are going to win out over the people who don't have to use it.
Wouldn't it be a great world is everyone just used the best solution, rather than the one for religious reasons? There is a reason that MS/Office won. And it's not because Microsoft is evil.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I don't care about the office suite. My main obsession is about file formats.
Nowadays there are two open source word processors, Abyword and Kword. Do these projects work together on file format ? No. There will be a format for Abyword and a format for Kword... Do they work together on reverse MS office file formats ? No.
Last point : it would be nice if Sun open filters of StarOffice !
You may want to consider TradeServerTM as a Linux migration path from Microsoft ExchangeTM. TradeServer combines the full funtionality and inter-operability of Bynari's TradeclientTM, as well as Microsoft's OutlookTM client, using standards based non-proprietary protocols.
Features: TradeServer functionality includes the following:
Interoperability with Outlook 2000, and earlier versions of Outlook
A cost effective alternative to proprietary software solutions, resulting in a significant reduction of Total Cost of Ownersip (TCO).
Stability and robustness of the Linux OS for a scalable, reliable platform suited for stand alone and distributed deployment models.
Excellent scalability from stand alone installation to distributed deployments, with support for multiple databases, and one MILLION entries per database.
X based configuration and administration tools, as well as a web based administration option, allows for a variety of methods for deployment and management.
Features of TradeXCH E-Mail
Mime Support Message Digests Address Book (multiple)
Calendar Scheduling Contact Management Task Lists
Multiple POP3 accounts SMTP LDAP Filtering Signature file
support Ray Traced Icons
Eliminates: Additional equipment for e-mail connectivity with Exchange. Per seat cost for Exchange server. Software cost
Corel and bynari make it possible to go Microsoft free.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Personally, I think you can fit a Linux desktop into the average packer's head space. It would require a good system administrator, setting up a gnome or KDE environment, setting all the dot files read-only, removing any way to get a shell from the user account, and not giving the users the root password.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've been using Word Perfect Suite for Linux for some time now. Aside from some of the problems with window managers (transient windows tend to submerge themselves under Gnome/Sawfish), there doesn't seem to be any reason to choose MSOffice over WP. Certainly, there are some file format issues, but not huge ones. Personally, I don't see any reason why your average user couldn't handle a Corel Linux/WPO setup. Not only that, with Samba and WPO for Windows, there shouldn't be any problems with people who want to stick with Windows, too. (I know the goal is an MS free office, but there are often people who want to stick with what they know). Get the Windows people to use a neutral-type mail client (i.e. Eudora), and everything is cool and froody.
---Joe Merlino gnupg public key ID: 1E91EBAF
I have one guy that every time I go into his office I can explain to him (sometimes for the 3rd or 4th time) how to do something in plain english when our support and trainer can't teach the guy. OH BTW, he usually gets it eventually. I know, he drives me up a wall, but this is the kind of thing we need to do, more often. Then we get the general idea of what needs fixin. Only thing I can't figure out how to do is to explain to him why the CAPS LOCK keed should be normally off. EVERY E-MAIL I GET FROM HIM LOOKS LIKE THIS!
But we must learn patience. Personally, from personal experience, I have been in #linuxhelp on IRC and see someone asking well how do I do this, how do I do that in Linux. I usually HELP! I am not the guy who says just search Google or just got to and find it. I tell him EXACTLY where to find it. If that means I open up another browser and do the search for him, well, that's what I do. THEN if he asks you where you found it, that's when to reveal your source. When he find it, maybe he can look new questions up himself if they have time. I think users SHOULD know what a defrag is and a scandisk in windows. They should know these things even if computers are not their job but using one is because it's one of the things on how to take care of your tool. People wouldn't dream of not refilling a stapler and stuff liek that. I think automagic are great because it does simplify that job of using a computer, even for someone who knows what they are doing.
Gorkman
I was also not impressed with Word Perfect when I installed and played with it. It was faster, but would invariably crash when I tried to make tables. I think it was a libc-related problem.
The Helix desktop installer installed Abiword on my system, and I thought I'd give it a try. It's blazingly fast and seems to handle the MS Word documents I've given it better than Star Office does.
Personally I'd prefer to use LaTeX and crank out PDF files but most of our API documentation is currently in Word format, so I still need something capable of reading word files.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Solution: run MS Office etc. on *n*x by installing Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). I don't have first hand evidence, but others claim this is at least as stable as running MS Office under MS Windows.
AbiWord is taking enormous strides and has the best looking and easiest word processor around, and they cover SEVERAL operating systems. It's also about 2 megs, rarely crashes, and is having more and more features added, although its not totally loaded yet.
AbiWord is a great program and I recommend it for word processing in linux.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
A company called Bynari International (www.bynari.com) has created a linux client for MS Exchange. It does appear to support the calendar features of Exchange. They have even released a version of the mail client under the LGPL license. It looks really good but it doesn't support IMAP yet. tradeclient
Sun Microsystems doesn't use MS Office internally. The standard office suite is StarOffice. (Though it used to be Applixware)
That's a pretty good example if you ask me. There are more than 10,000 employees at Sun worldwide (I think close to 30,000 really but I'm not positive), and use of Microsoft products is strongly discouraged. You might want to present that to your superiors as evidence that a company doesn't need MS to survive.
- Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
1. Most people don't need the level of integration with the OS that MSOffice uses.
2. You can buy a computer without Windows, but not from a retail computer store. Order online, or from a mom & pop store and you can avoid the Microsoft Tax.
Even if you buy a computer with Windows, you still don't have to use MSOffice. I've been running a Linux-only desktop at home for almost two years. The few MSOffice documents I've needed to read were easily handled by StarOffice, AbiWord, or WordPerfect.
I have used many mail clients over the years. I recognize that my requirements change from time to time. I have decided that my one absolute requirement in a mail client is that it store mail in a plain text format.
StarMail is pretty good otherwise, but its binary file format kills it for me.
Uhh, any idiot can point and click their way around X-Windows, and you can set that to be their default boot. xvwm95.... I really don't see what's so hard here... Maybe they'll complain that they can't run the viruses they get in the e-mail?
Eh...
I am a full-time university student studying Finance, Economics, and Mathematics. As such, I do a lot of statistics work for classes. I recently had a class where we had a large number of homework assignments that involved computing statistics at home with a spreadsheet (rather than in class in a computer lab).
Excel has a number of data-analysis functions which are sadly unavailable in StarOffice (an otherwise great suite), such as Z and T tests, Correlation Matrices, ANOVA, and Regression calculation.
LUCKILY Gnumeric has many of these functions (although they are not _quite_ as robust as the Excel versions and a few [such as Two-Factor ANOVA with Replication] are missing entirely).
Luckily I was able to complete 95% of the homework assignments in Linux (going to a computer lab to do the remaining ones on Excel) using Gnumeric, but before reccommending that an entire office--including people who will need to do statistical work--switch to StarOffice, please make sure you explore all the possible functions of Microsoft Office components which need to be replicated
(Actually everything else seems fine in the Linux arena from a number of offerings including StarOffice, Gnome Office, KOffice, etc., except the Excel clones...)
James Blachly
Ziff-Davis loves Microsoft because all the little changes, upgrades, inconsistencies, etc. have given them a grand opportunity to do lots of reviews, articles, recommendations, etc. MS is a wet dream for the circulation department at ZD. With minimal to no research they can make important and official-sounding reports on the marketplace.
At every turn, they judge a product's quality in light of the existing Microsoft product. For instance, in the article currently in question, which I read last week in "eWeek", they review various Non-MS Office scenarios. One was particularly telling. A company had chosen to go with Macs and use the AppleWorks (nee ClarisWorks) programs that were bundled with the machines, because they suited their needs and were free (bundled). The ZD writer sadly recounted how their untenable position faltered when they began having to cope with Microsoft documents, and that they ended up relenting somewhat and buying a single copy of office with which to do format conversions. The ZD writer remarked on how that was still a bad idea, the implication being that they wouldn't have gotten with it until they went for an all MS-Office installation.
The assumption ZD made throughout the whole article is that is reasonable that everyone should have to use proprietary, undocumented file formats simply because they are prevelant in the market. The correct response when someone delivers a document in a proprietary format, excpecting you to just cope with it, is to mail back your own favorite proprietary document format. And then ask the sender to use a standard format, like RTF, the next time.
If we can, through simple peer pressure, encourage everyone to use standard, open formats, then it will not matter what word processors and other programs people use. The whole reason MS started using "OLE Structured Storage" for its file formats is not that it's a good format, but rather that it implies Windows, or at least MS office products (MS ported COM to the Mac in order to support office).
Encourage open formats, and everyone will have choice!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Star, we all know, works with .doc .rtf, etc...
But nothing would have helped with today-- idiot secretary emailed me files containing news releases to add to our website (asking her to ftp is too much to handle for her, and I don't want to give up the responsibility and watch her delete mangle the whole site.) She sent everything in .dot format (word document template.) Star was useless. Abi was useless.
reboot to win98 useless
let's not forget bi-directional language problems... nothing does hebrew well yet.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart so here are all the details I have uncovered while researching this subject my self:
It all revoles around the calendaring problem. We have POP/IMAP for e-mail, LDAP for contacts/address book, but no calendar server! Why not? Because there is no internet standard protocol for calendering... YET. The IETF's calendaring and scheduling working group has invented such a protocol and named it CAP (calendar access protocol). CAP is currently in draft phase and thus no server implementations have been written yet. Once CAP is finished you could see several interesting possible situations develop...
Say you are required to run windows and Outlook on the desktop, but have linux in the server room. Someone could reverse engineer the Outlook+Exchange protocol and create a linux based Exchange to IMAP/LDAP/CAP translating gateway. You would point outlook at a computer running this translator daemon and it would think it was talking to an exchange server, but really the outlook+exchange protocol commands would be translated into the appropriate IMAP/LDAP/CAP commands and passed along. No more having to run exchange server!
I am currently the lead developer for project Eridu which is aiming to create a web based clone of outlook that provides all the functionality of outlook+exchange but using internet standard servers. We are forced to use SQL for the calendar server portion for now, but as soon as the first CAP server becomes available we will use that.
I also think that as soon as CAP servers become available, you will see KDE and Gnome's e-mail client support it and all the propriatary methods they are using now will go away.
Yes!!! I don't know what thew big problem is. StarOffice 5.2 (Which is still in beta) is much better than the MS-Office counterparts. Not only is it better functionally, but it can save in StarOffice format, or the MS-Office formats. StarWord can save a file as StarWord v3-v5 (current). It can be saved as HTML, DOS Text, Unix Text, Plain Text, MS-Office formats "WinWord 6"-"WinWord 2000". Let's not forget the best one. The one single format that works with WordPad since Windows 1.01 and even DOS word programs can read it... Rich Text Format (RTF). Now That is just the Word documents, but the rest have the same compatibility. You can save a slideshow as powerpoint format (but the StarPresent format is about 5 times more compressed, with more features than the PowerPoint counterpart)
The whole point of this is that part of your office could switch to StarOffice, and the others wouldn't even know. Your customers wouldn't know anything either. You might urge them to switch, without any time limit in wich they MUST change.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If you use StarOffice with files, produced by anything from Microsoft, get TrueType fonts that Microsoft uses (btw, most of them aren't from Microsoft -- they are licensed from Monotype). I was always surprised by poor formatting that StarOffice produced until I have realized that Word and PowerPoint files depend on precise size of the characters to be displayed correctly, and StarOffice will demand X to scale the unscaleable instead of re-formatting the text for available fonts. Most likely it's not StarOffice's fault but a design flaw in the formatting procedures.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I hear lots of talk about how MS Office is nearly good enough (in 90% of cases) to import your typical MS Office file. Consider MS Excel's situation in the days when Lotus 123 reigned supreme. The beginning of the end for Lotus was when MS brought out a version of Excel (3.0 I believe) that actually handled 123 files BETTER than Lotus itself. Excel actually executes Lotus 123 macros faster than real Lotus 123, and thus more than overcame the standard "I have a huge investment in 123 files and macros" argument. Think of this as the bar that StarOffice has to reach to gain widespread acceptance: recreating hundreds of word and excel documents is FAR more expensive than the $xxx that MS charges for an Office license. StarOffice has to overcome this and maintain its lower price.
http://www.laural.com/
Ever hear of os/2? You can still get an avatar of this: Workspace for e-business (clunky name, but still...) And if you think office monkeys can't use os/2, think again.
There exist NOW offices that use exclusively os/2. You're only correct if you say "well, there is a taint of M$ in os/2" - and that is literally true but practically it's misleading.
Of course the Microsoft-Free office is possible! The only reason you don't see many of them is that a lot of office workers want Microsoft.
Where I work, the engineering department is almost completely Microsoft free. The only exceptions are for *customer* compatibility (some DICOM applications work under Windows only), and some newbie upper management. All of our day to day office type stuff are be done using Unix applications, primarily FrameMaker, WingZ, and Netscape. And I'm not just talking about software engineers. I'm also talking about hardware hackers, chip cowboys, UI interface design, and product development. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to imagine the department completely MS free.
Our business department, on the other hand, seem totally Microsoft dependant. They are incapable of converting Word documents to plain text before broadcasting them to the whole company. It thus becomes the self-imposed responsibility of certain engineers to convert these docs to Frame or text. I have a very strong suspicion that the front office dependance on Microsoft lies not because Microsoft demands they use their products, but because they are computer illiterate. No matter how much we scream, beg and threaten, HR just cannot grasp the concept of sending out email text only. If even the simple concept of ascii format is beyond them, trying to use a non-MS product would probably send them over the edge into shivering incoherence.
It wasn't that long ago when a nation of secretaries said "give me WordPerfect 5.1 or give me death". I know several that quit and started their own businesses rather than use the fledgling Word their bosses wanted. Nowadays, even typing the name of an application on a command line is a lost skill. But since it's been done before, it can be done again. All we have to do is demand that business schools teach general computing instead of offering certificates in specific applications. A friend of mine is majoring in computer science at a junior college. I asked him what he was taking. He replied, Windows 95/98, Autocad, and HTML. His utter sincerity open my eyes to the fact that they problem isn't Microsoft, it's illiteracy.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Every time a discussion like this comes up everybody always talks about wordProcessor X or Spreadsheet Y vs. MS equivalents. We usually bringup KDE and GNOME and X in general as well. We keep rehashing the wrong things. Free/Open Source tools are developed enough on the desktop to accomodate the vast amjority of business users, more reliably and efficiently than the current MS equivalent.
But good desktop software *IS NOT* the problem with businesses adopting open source software for the desktop. Every business I have come across has one or two crappy little applications that they depend on, that are only available on the Windows platform. I am talking about shitty little applications devloped by a key vendor/supplier or even large customer, that they must run. Of of my clients (a credit union) must use a DG DASHER terminal emulator to connect with their service bureau. They also have propreitary applications to order checks, track ATM data, pull credit reports, and about four to produce various audit reports for the government. Most of these applications are very simple, I would guess a proficient programmer (with help for the other side) could port these or clone the functionality in less than a week.
The point here is it would be stupid for me to try to migrate there desktop over to Linux or BSD because the hoops they would have to jump through just for the 5% of the time when they need these silly little applications.
I also have a client that does direct mailings (and depends on proprietary softawre to control address printers, maillist sorters/correctors), a tree farm who depends on proprietary label making software. The list goes on. . .
If we want to dethrone MS on the desktop it is these millions of crappy apps that need to come over to Linux. Developing and maintaining them will be a huge chore, and will likely face opposition from the small companies that develop the software who do not understand the concept of open-source.
I have been preparing a business plan to deal with this issue, and put together a repository and a team of developers to port/clone these applications. So far I have only outlined the plan, and began documenting business cases and researched the feasibility. I am looking for help with this. I would love to here from anyone with comments or ideas on the subject. Please email me at brandon_phillips@hotmail.com if you are interested in helping launch my effort, or if you know of anyone that has a similar project already started.
Thanks,
Brandon
At my office everyone runs Linux, uses GNOME w/sawmill, and StarOffice. Outside of an oocasional issue with the PalmPilots everything is smooth. We push software updates through NFS with a custom script. When we upgrade a major component... we just tell everyone to reboot their machine and the init script updates.
And if what you say is correct, they
haven't done it the "proper" way.
I still think they will..
if it runs through emulation right now,
it's just normal (bad) corporate policy
to get something out the door.
Come on. Keep dreaming. Linux is a horrible choice for the average office worker unles he/she is a programmer or other type developer. And Star Office is no better in terms of usability, etc.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
It's possible to fetch email from an Exchange server via POP3. I don't know if this works for all Exchange servers though. Use the exchange server your mailbox is held on as the host. Username is of the format domain\username/emailaddress(only the stuff before the @) eg. sales\bob1/bob.jones Password is as usual. Hope this helps.
Microsoft-free offices are not only possible, the exist. I own and manage my own retail company. Every system in my organization is a Linux system. We use Star Office for all of our documentation purposes, and we've had NO troubles exchanging documents with MS Office users(in truth, it rarely happens). Did I benefit from this setup? You bet. As far as computers go, I got the whole thing up and running for only the price of the hardware and the Star Office disks(much cheaper than MS Office!).
Therefore I think it is time to make a basic hyper-logic office suit, as universal as possible, which would run on Linux, be free and could form a introduction to all offices not only the MS one.
lucky desperado
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
Where was ms advising you of the total cost of ownership when it was stealing the Data Base market from Borland?
Where was ms advising you about TCO when it was stealing the word processor market away from word perfect?
Where was ms advising you about the TCO when stealing the browser market away from Netscape?
___
In some organizations it is going the other way. One large organization I know of is very likely to go to Linux on the desktop: they have huge investments in Solaris and HP/UX, and they're worried that people will leave if forced to use NT. Gradually young linux advocates like us will infiltrate everything (you want to hire someone competent with computers? Chances are they've played with Linux a fair bit), and it will gradually get more support.
Yes, it's official: The average user doesn't know how to use linux. This is your single, biggest challenge.
This is not the problem. There's lots of good GUIs for unix. You can even make X look like windows 95. Most users won't need to know anything they don't already know about Windows, just double-click the icon for the program they use and away they go.
Which brings me to another point, which is about the fallacy that "users just log in, do their work and log out." What happens with windows machines at least twice a week (and often at least once daily) is that the user logs in, tries to do their work until windows crashes, then they spend another five minutes doing nothing while windows reboots, scans the drive and makes a lame attempt at recovering the data that they were working on at the time. With a unix workstation, the user logs in in the morning, does their work and logs out at 5:00. And it will continue to do so under such light loads for many months. When something breaks, half the time you just telnet in and fix it for them while you talk to them on the phone - something that's much more difficult to do with windows 98 - and which makes getting rid of that evil vi paperclip that much easier. ;)
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
You make an interesting point, but I strongly disagree with your conclusion. Why is it bad to make cross platform compatible software if Corel's ultimate goal is to lessen MS monopoly on the desktop?
To me it is a "good thing"(tm) to have multiple applications developers pursuing multi-ways of developing applications. To say that one particular method is "Bad" because it doesn't adhere to your purist vision vision is being an OSS elitist.
You seem to think we live in a world where software developers are free to choose not to develop software for Windows, well for the most part that isn't true. Once a company reaches a given size, it needs to maximize its revenue, and minimize costs. Corel has chosen to do this by developing to a common interface. They tried to develop WP2k both ways, and found that running under WINE, rather than compiling the binaries natively was the most efficient way to meet their goals of cost effectiveness and cross-platform compatibility. As it is they can barely keep enough cash coming in to stay afloat, if they had to devote more resources (and likely postpone the release date several months) just to be able to meet your standards, they likely would be bankrupt now and MS would have claimed another victim and Linux users would have one less company contributing resources & applications to the open source movement.
If anyone is "Bad" then it would have to be IBM and MS who have chosen not to even attempt to release their office suites on an open source platform.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Unfortunately, it seems that StarOffice is the best currently available office suite for Linux. However, it is a Windows/MSOffice rip-off, minus some of the MSOffice functionality. Furthermore, it's not even open source--it's released under a one-user-only, you-have-no-right-to-distribute-reverse-engineer-o r-modify-this-software license comparable to that of most commercial software products. Other than making it possible to spend more time in Linux, what's the point? Also, given that Sun has a snowball's chance in hell of getting StarOffice to compete in any meaningful way with MSOffice in the current situation (they can't even give it away), why not release StarOffice under an open source license? Maybe that would get it somewhere. Hopefully AbiWord & pals will develop successfully.
Found this office clone sometime ago and was curious how good it was:
pc602pro
It claims file format compatibility up to MSO2000, the same applications, much smaller space required and 1/4 cost. OK, it runs on windows, but I think it's still on topic...
The last thing the Linux community needs is more people who want everything done for them.
Damn, take it easy. This guy's just looking for help.
-jpowers
-jpowers
For a small office, the possibility to go without MS right now is real, but most large companies would be crazy to attempt it.
This page suggests that printing to the IBM 4019 is possible under linux. Just search for 4019.
Non-postscript, he "Used printtool to set it as an HP LaserJet." Postscript, you need a $95 card. He posted some settings and stuff, too. Are you using it as a network printer or right off the parallel? Are you using an IBM PC (the parallel port addressing can be different) or running SuSE 6.3 (lpd-old is faulty, go to their page for the upgrade)?
-jpowers
-jpowers
Reading the oodles of noodles of comments everyone here seems to think that an MS-free office absolutely needs to be Linux. Right now Linux is too immature for professional desktops for the most part. Theres too much interaction between the user and the system for it to be terribly productive. Low level interaction is great when you're running a server or are tinkering about on your home system but in a corporate environment you need things that save you time. You may remember back to the days of OS/2 which was designed by IBM to be a strictly business environment, you turned it on and got to work. An MS-free office means alot more than just open sourced apps. A good choice as of late is Apple, once again have good productivity suites and a usable OS. What Linux needs right now is someone to put together a good set of tools for use in offices. Word processing is pointless if you can't print out your work with whatever printer your office has available. Generally open source development is done because said programmer has hardware X and needs to make it work with their system. If businesses have to wait around for device drivers and software for barcode readers and printers Linux will never make any headway in the corporate environment.
Besides the Linux centric attitude, everyone seems to be StarOffice centric. Are all Linux users this cheap? Unless your business gives away its source code for free and tries to profit off "support" you're going to make some money. With said money you can afford to pay for things. A good suite that hardly ever gets any attention is Applix. Not only is it supported on several operating systems (BSD, Solaris, Linux) it is also available for Alpha and PPC architectures. Another caveat of Applix is the Anyware Office suite. Anyware is a Java implimentation of the Applixware suite which can be run from any Java capable browser or Java-savy OS. Wow, that means you can set up an office on thin clients which is going to get you five thin clients for the price of a new workstation. Applix is a really nice suite of software. I suppose the qualm Linux fanatics have is you don't get to see the source code and actually have to pay for it. Thats just the client side stuff the users see, making an office MS-free on the backend gets even more difficult but it is possible, there WAS a time before MS Exchange and such things. Way back when documents were entirely ASCII typed on a terminal hooked up to a mainframe.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
We know that microsoft has to support open standards of postscript, otherwise their stuff wouldn't work with half the printers on the planet. This could be used as a universal viewing standard (even thoug it wouldn't be good for preserving context - like opening and modifying a spread sheet - it could still do a lot)
Quicken/Quickbooks is the indispensable, non-replaceble killer office app. It exports to MS Office 97 or 2000, and no others, at all, ever, under any circumstances. It has crappy CSV and spreadsheet exports, but it dumps all data into the first and only field. Parse that. Not.
I just installed the premier mailing list managers for nonprofits, Paradigm (JSI) and Metafile (Metafile), in the last few weeks. An install and dataconvert runs $25k (real minimum) to $75k (average). They export to MS Office, and no other. Who cares if you save $300 with a free word processor. MS Windows OS and programs can no longer export or read dBIII files, so that format non longer exists.
None of the four above programs work with Word Perfect, period. That is why WP2000 is being sold for $50, and why Corel is toast.
This would have made a topic in the antitrust suit, but the dimwits in the Justice Dept. don't understand the concept of tieing.
If you want MS Office compatibility, use MS products. And, be sure to use the exact same version of MS Office and Windows. You will pay, and pay and keep paying with each forced upgrade, but you will have compatiblitiy. Nothing else will give you this.
Chasing after MS "standards" is your choice. There are a number of open source and other products ranging from word processors to email routers that can handle MS only extensions somewhat, but none can handle the whole gamut perfectly enough for those ninnies that just have to have the latest MS gimmick or bastardization of open protocols they have corrupted to only work with a total MS shop, from the server down to the files you put on a laptop and take home.
Really, if is shamefull for you to come to this forum for advice on how to integrate open source and other solutions with MS ones. MS has made the decision to break every open standard it can to enforce MS only solutions across the board. This is incompatible with interoperability. Catering to the whimpering needs of people and companies which are afraid to break free of the MS trap only hurts open source and competition. Why? Because every effort to integrate MS with the rest of the world makes it that much easier for MS to corrupt the very tools used to integrate with = look what they did to Kerebos.
It is getting worse with Windows 2000. You haven't seen anything yet because large parts of Win 2k cannot be fully implemented without MS at all levels of the enterprise - server, middleware, and workstations. Total. There is no room for compromise because MS has allowed no room for interoperability in its design, inentionally.
OK. This approach means loss of contracts for some IT consultants and perhaps getting fired when you suggest a Microsoft free solution. You said MS free office, and I take that literatlly. But later you take that back - what you really want is non-MS products that act like MS. If you still don't understand why this cannot be then you have learned nothing about how MS works even after two years of this trial about bundling and intentional sabatoge of efforts to "integrate" in a nice way with MS. MS does not want non-MS apps to integrate, really.
You cannot have it both ways. Neither can open source, generally. Neither can non MS commercial companies which want to be competetive. Action by the courts to remedy Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly position on the desktop may help and prevent extension of that monopoly to even more areas of computing like servers and the internet, which is already happening.
Utimately, it is up to each IT professional to make his choice for either a total MS solution or for competition and for open standards and protocols. You can't have it both ways. Integration with MS (unless they are severely penalized and forced to use open protocols) inevitably leads to corruption of those protocols into MS ones. If recommending a total non-MS solution costs you job offers and contracts, consider that the alternative leads to total control of software and internet stanedards and protocols by MS, and you will work as an IT professional only at the plesure of the boys in Redmond. In other words, you will be less than a peon, not an independent contactor, business owner, or professional - if you have any work at all. Look at what MS did to its own MSCE's recently by invalidating their certificates so they have to pay even more money to requality.
Running a small or home office largely Microsoft free is no problem, the productivity tools are there. You may, however, need to keep a windows system or Mac sitting around in a corner for the times you will inevitably have to deal with an MS formatted document that cannot be read properly with StarOffice, WordPerfect, Applix, or FrameMaker.
For large/medium corporate environments which are heavily invested in Microsoft office and email software, however, it will be very difficult to get them to switch to another system instantaneously. Many of them have spent much time and money getting their systems running smoothly and employees trained, and they do not want to change unless they see a tremendous functionality benefit.
One way that I have personally seen success, however, is in promoting a mixed environment. In one company where I worked, we were successful in getting one department to deploy Linux Workstations with VMware running Windows as a guest operating system. What swayed them to conseder this was the combination of the superior remote management abilities and stability of Linux combined with the ability of users to keep using most of their existing MS applications.
It's still not MS-free, of course, but the subtle advantage is that it provides a base from which new applications can be brought in on the Linux side of the fence rather than the Windows side. For example, when a few of the secretaries needed image processing capabilities for web page maintenance, they installed Gimp instead of Photoshop. Scanning was also done on the Linux side, using Sane. Sometimes it's easier to get your foot in the door in small steps than it is to completely turn things on their heads.
That switches SO from making a huge window that takes over the whole monitor, to making one which at least has a title bar for you grab and minimize/move. It doesn't change the basic suckage: StarOffice puts everything as windows within a big window, instead of using the window manager I picked and configured to my tastes.
The whole idea of having one window and then implementing your own window manager with in it is broken. StarOffice should really use X, instead of just poping up an xwindow and then re-implementing X and a window manager within it.
It has the feel of being designed by people who thought windows was great, or those who used Sun's CDE. Unless they hire some smart people who cultivate a sophisticated sense of annoyance at the condescending UI stupidities common today, the most they can ever hope to do is be equivalent to MS Office, which means that they are doomed.
Another strategy that I forgot to mention is to get people to change some of their applications before changing the entire platform. This is once again a small steps strategy rather than a replace-everything-at-once strategy.
The company where I currently do most of my work has a mixed environment of Windows PCs and UNIX workstations (HP-UX). We have been working with the IEEE on spec documents and they require documents to be submitted in FrameMaker format since that is what they use to publish their books. FrameMaker is available for HP-UX and Solaris, and is currently in beta for Linux. Several of us who prefer cross-platform tools have managed to use both the IEEE issue and the superiority of FrameMaker for large document design get the engineering department to switch from Word to FrameMaker for all of our important documentation. At first, they will buy mostly Windows versions, of course, but assuming Adobe follows through with a final Linux version, it will be one more piece in place to make possible adoption of Linux more feasible at some later date.
I just got Applix 5.0. Seems to be headed in the correct direction in a number of ways. They incorporate GTK widgets and themability. It opens all MS Word and excell stuff (including Word 2000). It comes with an O.K. vectorized graphics program. Its file format is a completely documented XML like text based file. Other neat stuff too: like instead of just cut and paste, you can use a "snap to the clipboard" feature. It allows you to take a bounded screen shot and paste it into the document as a bitmap. It also has drag 'n drop on Gnome and KDE desktops!
It doesn't have _all_ the functionatlity of MS Word, but god, who uses all that stuff anyway? It does do alot. I'm actually quite happy with it.
Also, its UI is much better than StarOffice, and it doesn't seem as bloated and slow.
If their graphics program just imported PostScript in a vectorized format!
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
VAX 11/750 with 3BSD, Vi, and troff would be my natual selection, but i'm a weirdo that way.
William D. Freeman http://members.xoom.com/EvilGNU -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS d- s+:++ a---
I've been using StarOffice on Windows for quite some time. Not only is it free, but it's much more powerful and scalable. Plus, I love the integration it has with the various programs, such as StarWriter and StarCalc. It may not be under the GPL (yet), but at least Sun does not force it on you like the Evil Empire does. I've unloaded all MSoffice programs except for Word and Excel because I sometimes get docs in that format.
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
I've been thinking of moving a company away from ms office. Risky move... especially since they are already using it. SO.. I haven't done it yet... but I've put a lot of thought into it. One thing I've noticed is that, although everyone tends to say that they need office so they can read documents from 'other' people.... 99% of those documents originate within the company. Exchange with outside companies can be handled by some kind of conversion process if necessary. Really.. the one big thing that keeps me from using staroffice is the fact that it's email package does not support imap. If it only did this, I would be oh so happy..... I could offer a really cool desktop.
i work on editorial database systems for print and web... editors use quark for print and word for the web (text eventually gets shipped from smallish rad-rdms fourth dimension to informix--save the sarcasm, 4d is truly great for small systems development).
during the winter, i created a system for web promotional text, fun system where stuff can be edited as copy on screen (where the user has to input any tags they want, mainly just bold and italic) or using a wysiwyg html exported document. they use word--and when you construct the html, word does not actually pile in a truckload of shit (as when creating a document itself).
ah, after initial testing, i though everything would be okay (i never fucking use word 2000, and i am becoming increasingly more ashamed to be using word 5.1, even though it is/was a truly great application)... of course, i was foolish to think microsoft could do anything right, the modification of meta tags was not such a big deal, but here's what word 2000 does to valid html...
1) convert iso characters to string entities on save (no option to control this?)
2) implements the obscure entity (what were they thinking?)
3) and the gotcha, you have typographic quotes in your copy? not after the editor saves changes! (now this damage can be fixed most of the time... um, what that really means is the damage cannot be fixed reliably in post-processing.)
and the average joe on the street thinks microsoft engineers are the queen's fucking bees? oh please. working with quark is hard, but the company has been improving (adobe competition will force the company to work with customers, or go without work) and page layout is complex, but html?
microsoft is fundamentally corrupt--two parts arrogance, three parts malice, one shot stupidity, and some base fizz, that's all. i will never use a microsoft product i am not being paid to use, even then i will protest there is a better, safer solution (only after the company is broken apart will i consider using anything developed by microshaft ).
Here's a good starting point for information on Exchange and Outlook - http://www.slipstick.com -Jerry
Long Live GNU/Linux!
Microsoft says it encourages competition.. yet is accused, and has been proven gulity of locking out competition in the market. They say they give their customers CHOICE.. yet how many people HONESTLY are choosing to use MS Windows and MS Word because they WANT TO? How many customers WISH there was another Office Suite they could try.. or another Operating System or Web Browser?
:)
If Microsoft says they are the LEADING innovators.. and they ENCOURAGE competition.. and they LISTEN to their customers and provide them CHOICE in this INNOVATIVE MARKET.. Then punish Microsoft by making them live up to their words. Its that simple. Making all the promises
in their marketing come true..
Take away Microsoft's LOCKS...
#1 - Allow the clonablity of MS Windows. Just like Compaq did to IBM PCs.. Just like Novell, Caldara, and IBM did to MS-DOS... just as
IBM also did to Windows with OS/2 Win 3.1 support... Just like Microsoft did to Apple.. just like Microsoft and Apple did to Xerox.. They
stole or used or copied or whatever'd someone elses work to get a leg up in the computing world.
#2 - Open up MS Office and other MS file formats... The BIGGEST reason why MS Office is the leading Office Suite should be because people LIKE to use it.. not because they are worried about compatiablity. People shouldn't be FORCED to pay the Microsoft TAX (Upgrades) everytime Microsoft figures its time to force users to upgrade again.. And it is a forcing.. because if you recieve MS Office 2000 files and your using MS Office 97.. you HAVE to upgrade in order to read them.. or expect the person on the other side to create the files in the older format. And its not realistic to expect someone to downgrade their features simply to be backwards compatible with YOU.. and so everyone has to upgrade. Wouldn't it be nice if people bought software just like they buy everything else.. By price comparison.. Performance, Reliablity, Support, etc. Why BUY something because the company has you LOCKED into them. If MS says they support competition and innovation.. freeing their customers to make a choice is the BEST way to support those ideals.
#3 - If two software companies are programming for the same plateform.. they should both have the same knowledge for that platform, no? If Microsoft has better knowledge of Windows Operating Systems then their competitiors.. then it stands to reason, that as long as the Windows operating system is dominatant.. Any software that MS releases for that operating system.. would stand a good chance of dominating.. both because the operating system is so wide spread and used.. and because MS can better intergrate their competiting software into their own Operating System.. And have very strong packaging deals with PC Vendors, thereby taking advantage of the lazy american way... Buy things in PACKAGES rather then put it together yourself with the software YOU WANT.. even if it means ordering the software seperating from somewhere else. And so the solution should either be breaking up the Operating system part of the company away from everything else (There is no reason why the IE
and MS Office portions of the company should be split from each other.. err no wait.. they might intergrate the two together.. Nevermind, split them too)... That way there is no longer any advantage in knowledge of the platform for the other parts of MS verses other competitiors out there. Either that or open up MS Windows. Microsoft can't have their cake and eat it too. If they don't want to be split up.. they have to open up the source for Windows so as to level the playing field. They can prevent commerical clones of Windows using the source if they want... but at least competiting software companies that make software like Office Suite's, email, browsers, etc.. can all program with the same knowledge about the plateform as everyones biggest competitor.. MS.
So basicly.. the answer is simple... DEFINITELY open up the popular MS file formats so that customers can CHOOSE their Office Suites. In the end, MS Office is a pretty damn good office suite out there on its own merits.. so MS should just chill out and realize that. And either open
up MS Windows or break up the company. One of those two HAS to happen in order to successfully undo the damage that was caused in the Personal Computing sector.
And if someone agrees with this enough to clean up my comment, and forward it to the DOJ.. I'll give them a cookie.
-Matthew
Technetos, Inc.
I need to use various European languages as well as Chinese and Japanese characters. You can do that in Linux -- with effort, some very beta parts of the OS, and none of the office suites I know of. For all its faults, MS Office 2000 handles these things like a charm. I can have single-byte (ASCII) and double-byte (Chinese, Japanese) characters in the same document or database, and it knows what to do with them. StarOffice and Wordperfect get the heck confused out of them by such things.
The reason is simply that MS has (finally, after much hesitation) come over to Unicode as a standard. Linux isn't there yet. Even Apple, which for a long time was ahead of Windows on these things, hasn't made it so easy to combine multiple script.
I've tried using Linux to do what I now do in Windows and Office (write a dissertation and maintain a database of Chinese- and Japanese-language materials). To do it in Linux, I would need to write a lot of C. Or wait a few years for others to do so. I consider myself computer literate -- but don't think that adapting to new software means writing it yourself.
.sig withheld by request
I think you have to realise that some people are very good at what they do, accountants, lawyers, doctors and in that domain, they are highly "intelligent" people. But often they do not work in a dynamic environment, forcing them to challenge themselves with new skills everyday and thus change comes quite hard to a lot of them... They lack a real computing "common sense" to be able to function even at a basic level with technology.
Admittedly I'd say probably 80% of workers outside IT handle computers to a reasonable level in their field. It's just the other 20% that constantly rings up help desk and take up 80% of their time with pretty dumb question about changing fonts or sth
And i think half the problem is that knowledge about computers is somehow intertwined with computer geeks shacked up in some underground bumker 10ft underground wearing 3 inch thick glasses playing with Linux. Although there's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's a lifestyle choice after-all, it's not a desireable image either. But why does being in IT preclude you from having a social life? Why does spending uni/college days studying UML and Java any different than reading through volumes of law books? I enjoy computers and I enjoy going out, and i suspect many other people do too... And for the people who don't enjoy going out, it's probably because they have sth better to do than watching the footy and getting drunk at the local pub, which, i guess, is should be fair enough
Where I work we have Macintosh and Windows workstations running MS Office, just about everything Adobe makes, Eudora, and a number of internet apps (Netscape, Telnet, etc.). They seem open to using Linux since money is short and any money saved on software means more money for much needed hardware. With the multitude of office programs (KOffice, StarOffice, Corel, AbiSource), GIMP, and all kinds of internet oriented apps and utilities, I could probably get people at work convinced of using a properly configured Linux workstation on ocassion... if it could connect easily to our Novell server.
The Mac users connect to the server via the Chooser (AppleTalk services) and the Windows users use... something else (IPX I assume since I don't think the server has an IP address). (Note: I was hired 'cause I know Macintoshes well, I'm handy with a screwdriver, I'm saavy enough with computers to fix most Windows and Unix problems and can move 50 pound printers and monitors easily, not because I'm a guru with Novell or Windows. Please forgive any vaugeness from my ignorance.)
What solutions are there, if any, to mount Novell or AppleTalk file shares on Linux? I'm aware that we could probably use any number of emulators, VMs, or compatibilty libraries (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, Mac-on-Linux, Bochs, VMWare, WINE, etc.) to connect but unless the connection to the server is nearly transparent any Linux box I set up will likely be unused and we lose money and productivity by buying and using such broken software as MS Office, MacOS and Wndows 98.
The XFMail project has now morphed into the Archimedes project.
Personally, what I would like to see on Linux is a mail program with all of the functionallity/good looks of Outlook Express, and then added functionality (to overtake and out do Outlook). There are several that are getting close, but I haven't seen one yet that will quite meet my needs...
On the Office Suite side, personally, I like Lotus SmartSuite (WordPro specifically) ... I could care less about MicroSoft Office, I've always hated the MicroSoft Office interface anyway.
I experienced a (mostly) Microsoft-free campus . I attended a state college in Masachusetts from 1995-1999. They did use Windows (though some departments used Macs), but until last year, when the state decided to standardize on MSOffice, they used non-Microsoft products.
Word Processing was done with WordPerfect, spreadsheet-related stuff with Lotus 1-2-3, database stuff with dBase and (later) Oracle. The Macs also used Claris Works. E-mail was handled by Pegasus Mail, Pine and (later) Netscape Messenger. The web browser was Netscape (even when we got Win '98) . CS students programmed with Borland C++ (DOS) and the OS class used Linux. The network featured UNIX and Netware.
Even advanced stuff was handled by non-Microsoft products. The school paper was laid out in Pagemaker. Their web page was created and maintained with Web Weaver. Graphics was taught with Photoshop.
One more thing- most non-Microsoft software is available for OSs other than Windows. Lotus Domino is available for UNIX and AS400. WordPerfect Suite has a Mac version.
If a largely Microsoft-free campus can be set up with a little extra effort, so can a completely Microsoft-free office.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
I have used this product for a while now and all my old documents done in Word work fine in Star Office. So why would you spend 1,200 bucks when you can download Star Office off sun's website (www.sun.com) There is no point in supporting Microsoft when they are ripping you off anyways, at least go to Corel Word Perfect Suite 2000. Its 200 bucks i like it a lot better.
P-Funk Rulz!
You can use xl2html if you just want to make HTML which you can then search using a conventional engine, or it should be simple to hack the back end of xl2html if you want it to spit the spreadsheet out as SQL.
The latter option would only be truly useful if the spreadsheets were all similar, or fell into a few similar sets. That being the case, a little forethought will allow you to do stats and graphing operations on the entire dataset that'll send the boss's eyebrows whizzing into his hairline.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's a bit difficult for faculty and staff to exchange files, but I'm willing to blame that on an education issue--the later versions of WP do a fine job reading and writing MS Office documents (test is that I know Microsoft employees read my online resume in Word format!)
Except for specialized applications (our library web catalog is the biggie at this point) our back-end infrastructure is NetWare, Linux, Solaris, Digital Unix, and AIX. Email is IMAP on a Solaris box, all Web services are Linux serving files off of NetWare, etc.
With WP 2000 for Linux, and a few weeks of hard effort, I could probably make a Linux-based config to replace the Windows config, that would work for all but the academic software that doesn't have a Linux version. This also precludes licensing issues being resolved for the commercial software (WP, whatever else.)
I figure in general, it's not a bad thing for students to learn the Windows operating system, it will probably be something they see again...
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
Now that Redhat is getting so friendly to install, there's no reason for probably 80% of windoze users not to switch.
Love 'em all and let God sort 'em out...
There's a growing amount of concern that Microsoft will attempt to corrupt XML when they adopt it as a file format. It's entirely possible that they'll find some way to do this, claiming to use the "XML Standard" and still managing to make their files impossible to read by any other application.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, but I don't *want* a WINE binary - partially because I'm running all the other Linux programs I use on non-Linux platforms. :)
Applix works on my box; WP2K doesn't. That's all I see.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Look, I'm not taking issue with the other things you said, but just get it that people are not stupid.
This much is true. About 10% of my clients actually read help and manuals. The results are... disturbing... for the we-know-what-you-want camp.
Maybe all them [...] just have something better to do with their time [...] ie. they have a life.
"I have no life. I really like it that way. I'm happy."
That's a direct quote of a friend of mine (female, pretty, not at all witless - but wouldn't know which end of the mouse to push the cheese into and isn't interested in finding out). She made the statement a year ago and is still happy.
You don't need to "have a life" to be uninterested in computers. QED. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Then that time is now. I am a geek, and I have many friends are geeks, and none of them want to "look up Lara Croft's undies". And I, at the least (I won't speak for my friends in this), have social skills and know the joy of interacting with live people (in real life, even, not IRC (!) or somesuch).
Besides, once they learn more about the computer, they cease to be purely a 'user', as the term is widely used.
---
END OF LINE
Anyway, that's the story we want to tell, we can do better than M$ is, we don't want to clone, we want to make our own stuff. At least I do. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer... :-)
/The Crimson Assurance Company/
So write text, do graphic design, run an index site, hand out CDs at trade shows, review things. Whatever works for you. Things that the programmers will do "later." Ahuk, ahuk, ahuk.
Want things to do? Get a ray-tracer or GIMP and make some decent tiles for xpuyopuyo or xjewel. Write a tutorial for dia. Put together a set of web-page templates that might some day get integrated into a FrontPage replacement. Something "trivial" and "safe" like that. Then extend your skills into areas you enjoy - or heck, just keep doing "trivial" things. They all need doing by somebody!
"And YOU...! Make the tea!" -- Monty Python,
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I tried XFMail and Post Office today and couldn't get either of them to build.
I spent about an hour with each of them. Post Office required a bunch of undocumented environment variables to be set in order to get it to build.
I think it's critically important that no software require an environment variable to get it to basically function. If it does, you can be sure the user will select a product from Microsoft or Apple instead.
This is with a Slackware 7 system.
XFMail hasn't been maintained in a year, and although it's taken new life as Archimedes it hasn't been released yet.
It is possible to retrieve it from CVS and build it that way. I'll give it a try
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The suspect: MS Office is the greatest well programmed, well built, best sold VIRUS.
;->
The possible mistake made: Having treated it like a solution.
The possible cure: See it like a virus, treat it like a virus.
(Please excuse this visionary low-tech post
Greetings
While I can appreciate where you are coming from with this statement, most moderate to large sized businesses would havily use macros, template, and graphs. All those standard document templates customised for the business, those graphs portraying SLAs and metrics etc. This would be one of the key issues for compatability.
what blew me away was Gnome's Gnumeric, a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been designed by MS without the drawbacks of having been implemented by them!
Most (if not all) of Microsoft's products are bought or (more or less) stolen, not designed in-house, starting from Q-DOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System"; yes, that's really where MS-DOS started - and finished). IE, possibly their core product, used to be SpyGlass. Access runs at finite speed because of technology gutted from FoxBASE Pro. Significant pieces of NT are spelling-error compatible with DEC's MICA O/S and other pieces simply reek of OS/2. Perhaps MS-Bob was designed in house?
How about "a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been bought by MS without the drawbacks of having actually been bought by them"?
Currently you can get a pretty MS-less office with StarOffice. There are some people who really like it.
And there are others who have tried SIAG Office and some of the other alternatives, and who like a finite response time in 32M or less of RAM. (-:
SO's big advanatge is that it looks and feel the way MS wanted Office to look and feel.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Why would anyone waste time and resources on such a thing?
Once bitten, twice shy. People do it so that they don't have to experience their reason(s) for hating Microsoft again. Daily, in some cases.
I despise Microsoft in a detached professional manner because I've re-installed Windows on various machines more times than I care to count. As well as annoying, that quickly gets expensive.
I also despise them in a personal manner for the many man-months of my own work lost from time to time in Word or Windows crashes.
Thank you, I've had enough.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Someone I trust said that he looked at one of the XML-formatted documents produced by Office 2000... 'and when the people in the building held up the sign saying "you are in a helicopter" the pilot said "aha, we're over the Microsoft campus - only they give you an answer which is technically correct while providing absolutely no information" and safely landed the helicopter in the fog.'
The Bad Old Format was [unintelligable garbage].
The New, Improved XML Format is <ms-office>[unitelligable garbage]</ms-office>.
Strictly speaking, and you can be damn sure that the Microsoft lawyers will insist you acknowledge it, this is valid XML since the DTD for the ms-office element is CDATA. However it provides absolutely no additional information of any value to anyone.
(P.S., the full joke I paraphrased to summarize my friend's comments is that a helicopter pilot is lost in a fog over Seattle. He carefully descends until he can see an office building, then holds up a sign saying he is lost and could they tell him where he is...)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
deal with Microsoft?s abuse
You could start by switching off so-called "smart" quotes in yor own Microsoft software. An even better step would be to use software other than Microsoft's to post with...
On the other hand, having question-marks appear every time Microsot's name is mentioned has a warped kind subliminal appeal... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Actually, you *could* work 20 hours a week right now and be able to support a family of four...
... provided you're willing to accept a 1960's lifestyle. A small house in a cookie cutter neighborhood far from anything interesting, perhaps 1200 sq ft, two bedrooms, 1 bathroom. No central air. No laundry facilities. A carport, or maybe a single-car garage. Your only car will have no ABS or CD player.
Your entertainment? A (as in *one*) TV, with only broadcast stations. No VCR, no rented movies, no cable. No video games. No personal computers.
Want to talk to friends and family? One telephone, no fancy features (caller ID, call waiting), no answering machine. No long distance calls.
Your diet? No soft drinks, or maybe a few cans per week. No frozen meals popped into a microwave, and few restaurant meals. Don't plan on eating meat with every meal either.
I was a kid in the 60's, but I don't want to trust my memory when comparing the two eras. But I also set up a post-college household a mere 15 years ago and recall spending more on a small color TV and a microwave oven, each, than I did on my monthly rent. Today I could buy a microwave, a midsize TV, a good VCR, and a mini-fridge for one month's rent for the same unit.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I cant change my office now, even though most of the PTB's in our PUBLICLY TRADED company use WP Suite. Because my company is in service, and we send out a lot of proposals and contracts electronically, we are stuck using both M$ and WP. We buy both because the PTB's can't learn how to save in the right format, and our clients are too inexperienced to use the open function in word corectly. Until someone can make something that converts XXX into M$ word, excell, & powerpoint with 100% readability for the m$ drone on the recieving end, I am stuck with microsoft OS and office suites.
Who throws his shoe anyway...I mean realy.
For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
"For whereas my forebears put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke: my father chastised you with Word, but I will chastise you with Outlook."
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I use Sun Sparc Solaris at home, with StartOffice for WP. My wife loves it!
..., how can I get my work back?" (strings <file.pub >rescued.txt)
Ditto Mandrake Linux. The only downer for her is that some of her (Windows) games and educational CDs won't work with it - a number which is steadily decreasing as WINE grows.
After WINE's next traumatic growth spurt (multiple emulation processes) settles down, I expect that they all will work. It's not exactly MS-free, but... she's now accustomed to walking away from her machine in the middle of something and coming back to it three days later. Save? Nah! It'll still be there.
It's going to be personally amusing when she does that with Windows apps.
Her sister runs Windows and is perennially griping about "it crashed in the middle of" or "it crashes whenever I load
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
All it does is start the text processor, or spreadsheet, or whatever, automatically within StarOffice, but it's no different from starting StarOffice and then opening a text document. I.e. if you then do the same thing for the spreadsheet, it opens up within the large MDI-type StarOffice window, not in a separate X window.
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Another example of following bad advise from inexperienced, haughty peers.
The reference is from Solomon's son and heir to the throne of Israel inaugural speech. The wise advisors recommended making the yoke (Solomon had taken the best and brightest from the people for his palace -- and bunches of their women) lighter to keep the peace. The young friends of Rehoboam said to be tough on the people. Shortly after this speech the Northern 10 tribes (of 12, in case you didn't know) split off, leaving the Davidic line with 2 kingdoms.
Oops.
"Hey everyone! I was just kidding!"
---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ----------------------------------
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
One reason my place don't use StarOffice is the dreadful swedish translation. More often than not it reads like VCR instructions, with occational enlish and german sentences thrown in for fun. OK so its free, but I can't tell a user to stand gibberish because it'll help the budget...
Like it or not the computer is an essential tool for the performance of many jobs. If you are a secretary and you can not use your computer to a minimum standard then you ought to be fired. Same as any accountant, doctor, lawyer etc. No matter what your job is you will be expected to be proficient in the effective use of ALL the tools of your trade. A doctor does not get to say "well I can use the scalpel just fine but I don't have time to learn how to use clamp" or "this blood respirator is just too complex and I am not going to learn it because I have a life".
If in the course of your job you are required to use a computer and you don't learn how to make efficient use of it then you deserve to get fired.
War is necrophilia.
And how easy to use is a car? I've never
learned to drive, and don't plan to, but
it certainly seems to me that learning
to drive well enough to be allowed on public
roads is harder than learning to "use"
a computer (whatever that means).
-- You've got to get a hat if you want to get ahead.
Another issue that has not been discussed here is: What is the business argument for making this switch in office environments? Anyone contemplating this will at some point have to present this to IS management and they are going to want to know what problem you will solve by incurring this major expense. I think mostly what they are going to say to you is that you are spending your time solving a problem that doesn't exist and, more importantly, incurring a cost that does not have to be incurred at all!
Or worse yet, they may agree with you and implement your change. However, IT budgets are not limitless these days and they may likely say that because you have convinced us of the importance of this we are going to have to put a large portion of our other development projects on hold until the change is implemented so we won't be able to budget those new Linux servers you have been asking for. Also, until the change is implemented, your time will have to be tasked to installing and configuring the new desktop systems, training the users, and converting all the accounting spreadsheet macros. Thanks and have a nice day! So be careful what you wish for.
Also, there have been many comments here about supporting both MS Office and other Office solutions simultaneously. A little history about the MS Office monopoly might be helpful here. Microsoft did not create the MS Office monopoly, they may have abused it, but they did not create it. This particular monopoly was largely created by IS managers in the eighties and early nineties who had had enough of supporting multiple productivity software applications within their organizations. IT budgets will not support dealing with multiple word processing and spreadsheet vendors anymore. Nor will they support training support staff in installing, configuring and providing technical support for multiple programs. It is this predictable and logical impulse by IS managers acting independently that has created the applications monopoly that Microsoft has.
If you are going to displace Microsoft at this level, you are going to have to build and demonstate to IT managers and users a completely better mousetrap. And you are going to have to do that on their terms, not yours. Like it or not, GUI's have completely replaced CLI's in main stream computer usage. Going back to CLI's is not the paradigm shift that is going to get that done. In fact, it is worth remembering that much of Microsoft's dominance in the applications market occurred during the last (GUI) paradigm shift. They certainly didn't invent the current GUI interface, but they were very quick to market with it on the PC platform. And in so doing, replaced both WordPerfect and Lotus (both also clueless at the time) in the word processing and spreadsheet spaces respectively. I don't think that change in market dominance would have occurred if they had had to compete with WordPerfect and Lotus by improving their products in an incremental way with pre-GUI interfaces. It took a paradigm shift to create the Microsoft applications monopoly, it's going to take another one to displace it. So if you think you are going to do this by giving users a bunch of keyboard templates, you had better stick to servers.
You never know, maybe M$ will open this protocol as they did Kerberos :)
We developed TradeXCHTM because the computer industry needed a UNIX/Linux client for MSExchangeTM with Outlook functionality. TradeXCH bridges the gap between Outlook users and UNIX/Linux users allowing them to work together.
The same company (Bynari Systems) offer an Exchange Server replacement for Linux at $599 for unlimited users.
I have not used either of these products myself so I don't know how good they are...does anyone have any experience of using them?
like MS to bastardize them with implementation-specific "features". (again, look at what MS is doing with their Word2000-generated "HTML" docs. If they're displayable in anything other than IE5, I'll be highly surprised)
What a load of crap. I've got a fairly large document (100 pages of text and images) which i saved as html/xml from Word 2000. Although it looks like shit in Netscape, it looks great in IE5 and Mozilla.
Reason? Netscape standards support sucks. You can't expect Microsoft to use 5 year old HTML technologies when they have a powerful modern browser that suppports new standards.
As a polish Linux user who is studying in Germany I think that the largest problem with SO and other MS-Office replacements is the native language support. Germans and other West-European languages are here in a slightly better situation than the East-European languages and languages using a kyryllic font, because of the different encoding and fonts. Polish version of MS office is badly polonized, with a bed spellchecker and poor translation; however, this is still better then zero. You have to hack SO to actually make it accept keyboard shortcuts for polish characters, and I never got WordPerfect to display all polish characters correctly for more then one single font face. There is only one and quite poor polish ispell dictionary --- it is not easy to create a dictionary for a language which has seven cases (nominativus, genitivus etc.), a complicated ortography and a lot of different verb, noun and adjective forms.
There is no fully polonized version of SO, Applixware, WordPerfect or any other of the proposed MS Office substitutions, and the same holds for a myriad of other languages. You have to speak german, english or maybe french to use them, and even then you don't have always the possibility to even spell your name correctly. The only alternative for Word is LaTeX, and though this is my primary publishing tool it is still sometimes very painfull to use, and it gives none at all compatibility with MS Office.
Compatibility
Solutions which can be acceptable when converting to and from english Word documents fail pathetically if you try to convert a document with native language characters, especially from a non-ISO-8859-1 language. Sometimes you just see strange characters, and you have to find-and-replace manually or with a macro. However, with Unicode this became impossible in many instances. Even Word for Macintosh 98 is not capable of importing a Word for Windows documents written in polish language. All polish characters become "_", which clearly makes any search-and-replace impossible. This is similar when using Star Office or Word Perfect.
Coherence
Everybody seems to play his own game. There is not a single commercial application capable of using ispell; none of them use locales or any other mechanisms provided by the system. Linux is especially popular among scientists -- why is that only Lyx tries to use BibTeX, the citation manager for LaTeX? (and, except in the easiest cases, tries and fails). Instead of a coordinated effort which would be able to bring a spectrum of reasonable MS Office alternatives, we have a spectrum of handicapped beta-versions which do not allow volunteers to participate and extend the existing programs.
Conclusions
Following is, in my humble opinion, necessary to create a working replacement for Word and associates:
-- good national translation or a mechanism allowing free (as in "freedom") translating effort leading to a such translation; using locales would be welcomed,
-- Unicode support, at least at the import/export stage,
-- common dictionary effort - all such programs should be able to use ispell,
-- most of all, realizing that there is a huge group of people who do not write their documents in English and who need national language support. Corel, Lotus and others where ignorant and arrogant in regard to this fact; this is why I doubt there is a single office in Poland using any of their tools. Even the most hardcore WordPerfect users had to switch to MS Word -- because old WP does not import new documents, and new WP does not handle national extensions, not even the minimum.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
January
Dude, I have two college degrees. One was Associate of Arts in Computers and Information Systems, the other was a Bachelor of Arts in Management Information Systems.
I learned concepts such as statistics, accounting, programming theory, operational mathematics, systems analysis and design, and database theory and concepts.
Sadly, all they taught was COBOL and dBASE III. That was in the late 80's.
Why are you so elitist. What makes you better than me? I apply my skills and knowledge and make sure I create professional applications.
The fact of the matter is, people like you created these high-level languages so people like us would be able to do more computer work. That is the whole point of developing 4GLs, languages, and applications servers such as SQL, VBScript, JavaScript, PHP, and Cold Fusion.
We all shouldn't have to deal with compliers, multi-threading, and assembly code, now, should we?
I think you missed my point.
Allaire and Microsoft have comprehensive and easy to read documentation that excel at teaching people how to use their platform.
Let me compare Allaire docs for CF 4.5 to PHP 4.0. The Allaire books give comprehensive examples for each of their functions, in the context of the programing environment in their reference manual. For new releases, they have a well-written document that explain the new features they added, as well as bugs that have been reported, etc. They also supplement this with books teaching the basics.
I go to www.php.net. I want to find the new features in 4.0 on their site. Haven't been able to find it. The documentation for using COM objects just says ???. In my opinion, that's inexcusable. Plus, they don't really teach the concepts either.
Maybe you have a problem with the "encrypted string" functions. Having the source code to the product is not as important to me--since it's not likely something I can manipulate. It's having documentation that aims at the new user and is as complete as possible.
And the whole point I was saying is, if people developing software are not writing proper docs so other people can join the geek club, imagine how it is for the non-geek to move from OS to OS.
I would hate to see on office solution without Excel. If you work with numbers, there is no better. When there is something better, great!, until then I'd like to hold onto this one.
Micro$oft is creating it's own standards just to be sure nobody without a money counterpart will be able to correctly process what have been saved or what is to be saved, in extenso, they 'manage' the competition. And it's pretty easy for them to realize only parts of it, so only their latest product is doing the job well ... that's funny: isn't it exactly what is happening right nowadays ? ;)
Why should we be among his cattles ?
Why should we restrict the Linux developpers from creating the best tools possible for the best OS possible ???
If you want a small, fast, reasonably safe email client, try Eudora Light .. comes in WinXX/Mac versions, doesn't do any of this mysterious sh** behind the scenes (straight clean RFC822 SMTP/POP3 with normal MIME encoding), will talk to ANY normal mail server, works beautifully with most, and tells you what the fsck it's doing when it does it. No, I don't work for them, I just use their products.
..
Eudora Pro is a bit annoying, but Light is just enough functionality for me without all the bloat, and it *doesn't* automatically run foreign executables. Shoot, it doesn't run them, period, until it's made sure I know the risks and trust the sender
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
At this point, I've really only got one application that demands a MS OS. MS Money. I wish it wasn't so, but nothing else does what I want - e banking with direct downloads to my PC from my bank. (Don't get me started on Intuit. GnuCash shows promise. In a couple of years I may be able to purge my home completely.)
I've looked at a few different applications for my environment, and Ihave a few comments:
- SOis pretty good, unless you want to use Outlook calendaring functions, which are not an option, dang it.
- My wife adapted to Gnome (and briefly to KDE) very well. My wife is a very smart woman, and quite tech savvy, although she vehemently opposes being called a "geek." (She's a library geek.)
- You can use any font you want, as long as it's PS. Unfortunately, although there are some hacks to provide X renderings for TTF, PS is it. (This is not a major problem until you add Windows apps with TTF typefaces. ) This means that even though you may see TTF on the screen, you won't necessarily see it that way on the printout.
- Non-PSprinters are generally supported well, except for WinPrinters (which are coming along)
- File formats are a challenge. I really don't like being locked in to ANY vendor's formatting. I can't wait to see many people REALLY implement XML. HTML is not good enough for my document-processing needs. XML offers the promise of portability between document processors. I hope it makes it.
- File conversion is dicey because of issues related to fonts and formatting within files. Generally "true" file portability between suites is generally impossible. There are too many layout-specific things. Just try to create a special size document in one application and move it to the other without reformatting.
- MSmakes clip art easy. Clip art is not as plentiful, or as organized for other platforms as it is for MS. This has been an issue for my wife who likes to make postcards, letters with graphics, etc
- Custom documents - like expense reports don't convert well
- There's no conversion of macros from one platform to the other. This is generally bad, but sometimes is quite good. (ILOVEYOU)
In general, I think that it is quite doable. You simply need to be forewarned about some of the challenges that you will face with this type of project.Hope it works!
R,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
The only thing I use MS Office for is to write my staff report...which can easily be done in Plain Old Text. Of course, executives up the food chain often send email with MS Word documents as attachments. Other people around here use PowerPoint for presentations. Other than that I don't see why we should be sinking so much money into the black hole of MS office. I don't know of any special features of MS office we actually USE, as opposed to some generic word processor. We could probably just switch to Wordpad or something at least. From the comments of my coworkers it seems that the consensus is that MS Office is just a necessary evil that we have to live with. Besides a staff report once every two weeks, the hundreds of dollars of MS Office software on this machine is totally wasted and useless.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
There are sort of two levels to this discussion. The first is about Microsoft servers and mail systems and Outlook, Messaging, etc. The second is the Office Suite, meaning what the average consumer might buy, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and maybe Outlook for their Email and Front Page for Web stuff. I've used Word/Excel/PPoint since 1991, and I frankly have no desire to learn something new. I would much prefer to learn a new operating system than learn a new office suite. The M$ apps are big and clunky, but I'm now quite good at using their bigness and clunkiness, and I've never really run into stability problems with them. But enough about me. The issue isn't as much what people know how to use, since most M$Office users only use a small subset of the programs' full functionalities. The issue is compatibility and availability. The business industry standard is M$Office. You just can't survive if you can't read and write those formats, and getting access to what those are for developers just ain't easy. What I would want would be versions of Word/etc. for Linux. Give me the stability and flexibility of the OS with the office suite I already know and like to use. If the feds would just make Microsoft give up their source code. If you _really_ make a better product, then you have nothing to worry about...
but they also have no clue how to use Windows!
Case in point - yesterday I went and got a new machine for my mom after her P100 I built for her finally gave up the ghost. We got it back to her house, I hooked it up, started it up. Everything was running great.
Then I needed to get her HP 722c printer running. Win98 has not a clue about that printer. Mom was really worried that it would not run. Then there was her scanner (also no Win98 support) and again she was worried it would not run.
Being the brilliant son I am, I simply went and got the drivers and everything worked slick.
I actually considered NOT putting Win98 on that machine and putting SuSE on instead. I may still do that - build a small machine with Linux only and see what happens when I give it to her.
The point of my story - had I not been there that computer would still be sitting in the box while she read over the instructions. Updating drivers is one of the easiest things to do - ya download it, run it, and wait - and if you are in Windows you get to reboot (hehe) - but it is still simple!
Want more proof? Go to your local bookstore and take a look at the books in the computer section. How many copies of things like "Windows Notepad for Dummies" do you see? I am willing to bet you are gonna find quite a few of those types of books. Okay, maybe not something for notepad.exe, but you are going to find lots of really big time "idiotic user" books. Why? Because they sell.
NOW tell me Windows is easier to use than Linux....
We've seen this sort of thing before. Something keeps changing, and a whole industry has sprung up to keep everyone up to date - the anti-virus market. Why has StarOffice not looked at this in the same fashion? Why not distribute new M$ file format descriptions as we would virus signature files? If a format description were encoded in a way that would allow an already deployed parser to interpret a new file without too much trouble.. [grind-grind, the squeak of turning wheels]
M$ claims that the next format they use will be a derivative of XML - this is too true, I'm sure, the format will certainly be a derivative of XML in some form. But this got me thinking. Why not look at M$ formats as already being XML-like. There's got to be a description of a particular version, that can be expressed separately from the parsing logic that actually does the reading.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I've used Netscape (4.5) to talk to the Exchange server at work, just told it it was an LDAP server (which is enabled on the exchange server as well), and there it was. No fuss, no muss, no Outlook.
I wonder what it would take to get a project going to offer a free open source clone of Office97, so that we can all be compatable, yet get on with our lives.
--Mike--
You *could* do it, but even if you did, think of this. My mom (who is 48 now) was a stay at home mom, and her main beef was that there aren't that many other stay at home mothers anymore. There was one other in the neighborhood we used to live in. That's how families could have one car and not go crazy, in the 50's-60's. The stay at home moms had their friends in the neighborhood for company and didn't need to go places during the day.
This file format is very simple:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20000514T140000Z # this is just YYYYMMDD then a "T" as a
DTEND:20000514T150000Z # delimiter and hhmmss (UTC) then a "Z" to end
LOCATION:Conference Room
CATEGORIES:Business
DESCRIPTION:Mr So-and-So will talk about the effects of the...
SUMMARY:Quartely Sales Meeting
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
There already exists a platform-independent calendar sharing standard, and what's more, all the major PIM's (from MS to open-source) are in compliance). Additionally, vCard can be used to share contact information, and they all support that, as well.
It's more like the average UI designer has the IQ of a flatworm. Despite computers making possible an almost infinitely flexible UI, UI designers still make programs (and that includes GUI desktops) that are so complex and counter-intuitive that they require training and studying a manual. A good UI would be as obvious as a hammer or filing cabinet; there's right ways and wrong ways to use a hammer, and good and bad ways to file, but anyone can make either work, and you'll never see Using Hammers for Dummies or the Complete Idiots Guide to Filing Cabinets.
Now consider the whole group of secretaries, managers, engineers, and other non-IT employees. They spend (many of them) much of their days creating documents. Can't you just hear them saying "Why do they restrict the formats I can use in creating my documents for no good reason? I'm a professional, jsut let me use the tools I need to get my job done!".
-- Michael Chermside
Yes, it is possible.
You could do all your daily desktop chores with some of the Officesuites, like Staroffice, although I would recommend Applixware, which is faster and more stable and saves in some XMLformat. But you have to pay for it though.
But you need a way to access your business application (order, invoice and so on) from Linux before you throw out your Windows box. If all else fails, use Windows Terminal Server and an ICA client. Not good, but a workaround.
In a different matter,Exchange servers usually talks IMAP and POP3, therefore you should be able to fetch mail with IMAP MTAs, like fetchmail, or some MUAs, like Pine and Netscape.
Sometimes after an electrical storm I can see in five dimensions. --Cornfed, Duckman
He installed a Linux system for his mother (who didn't know anything about computers before) and showed her how to use mutt on the console. She used the system only for e-mailing him. Later on, she was introduced to newsgroups. One day, she told him she'd heard that "with Linux, you could use several programs at once", so he showed her Alt-Fx (which she considered truly amazing at first). Finally, there was lynx plus some picture viewing program for web browsing. I don't know whether he introduced her to X11 yet, but I doubt it - anything she needs runs quite well off the console, and she's happy with that.
Some time ago she participated in some kind of "Internet for elderly dummies" course. The teacher asked whether anyone already had internet experience. She was the only one. The teacher asked her what kind of browser she would use on her Windows machine, and he was quite shocked when she replied she only used Linux apps - appearantly he hadn't been introduced to the Joys of the Penguin yet.
Cthulhu fhtagn!
An "M$ Free Office" isn't just a dream, it should be the ideal. It should be the ideal of everyone who works with digital information to uncouple themselves (and their business) from poorly though solutions...and from paying for them.
An important aspect of finding a non-M$ method of managing data are potential issues involving licenses which need to be renewed? This has come up many times in talks I've had with MSCE's, and it's something which would seriously impact the bottom line of any company. Could you imagine being a corporate IT manager and suddenly having to make a yearly payment for both upgrades AND site licenses for several WANS?
M$ has been making an end-run on the entire corporate business market for the last 10 years, stitching everyone up tight with proprietary OS's and business applications. The only reason they probably haven't done it yet is because of the lawsuits and the emergence of software which will still allow people to get information from their old document formats (StarOffice,WP,others?).
Every company should have at least one dedicated individual who is required to kick all the zealots in the ass with the simple but hard to answer questions, like,
In 20 years, how are we supposed to manage the information and records (Office/WP/Excel/etc..etc...) being manipulated right now by our coworkers(slaves)?
When that person makes sure all the work being done isn't ending up in the digital trashcan, then maybe the choice of office applications becomes less political because the demands of maintaining just the information requires the information be free from proprietary formats (Word,WP,Excel,etc..etc...); at that point, the solutions which permit long-term use of information don't favor "flavor" of the year applications, like Office2000, or Office97.
Only the formats which are going to be useful in 20,50, and 100 years are going to be worth investing anything in. Otherwise, it's going to take a small army and a big budget to extract the information from all those proprietary formats.
Remember that the next time your company subscribes to the M$ Developer network and faithfully figures out how to deal with the firehose of changes and revisions and fixes and all the other B$.
Every IT (netslave) worker should vigorously archive all their efforts in plaintext whenever possible, and use established formats for graphics. Towards this end, GNU/Linux has a host of tools which makes this possible, and free for the inept and the skilled alike.
Maybe it's time companies took a stand and instead of presentation concentrated on the substance and the information instead of pushing crappy Power-pointless presentations through overheads to show their motivations.(yeah brother)
(hope I'm not just "ranting" to the choir here).
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
OTTAWA, CANADA--Corel Corporation (NASDAQ: CORL, TSE: COR) is pleased to announce WordPerfect(r) Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux(r) has been placed on Winmag.com's prestigious WinList.
Each month editors at Winmag.com, an online Windows(r) publication, test and evaluate numerous hardware and software products. The best rise to the exclusive WinList. Products remain on the list as long as they lead their category. WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux placed first in the category of Software -- Business Suites.
"In Linux, Corel's Suite is the only game in town and, as such, is a genuinely great office suite," said Warren Ernst, in Winmag.com's June 1, 2000 review of Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux. "It indeed brings Linux a step closer to a useful desktop operating system alternative in the modern office environment." Further in the review, Mr. Ernst went on to say, "This version of WordPerfect speaks 'Microsoft Office' fluently."
WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux packages WordPerfect(r) 9, Quattro(r) Pro 9, Paradox(r) 9, Corel(r) Presentations(tm) 9, Netscape(r) Communicator 4.7 along with 1000 True Type(r) fonts, 12,000 pieces of clipart, 200 stock photos and a copy of the Corel(r) LINUX(r) OS.
"I am thrilled a prestigious publication like Winmag.com has recognized the power and ease of use of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux," said Derek J. Burney, executive vice-president of engineering and chief technology officer of Corel Corporation. "This is a strong endorsement of what we've been saying all along. Not only do our Linux products give consumers another choice, but they also offer the best of both worlds by providing a bridge between Windows and Linux."
WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux (Standard and Deluxe Editions) hit store shelves in April and already the Deluxe Edition is among the top five best-selling Linux products in the U.S. retail market, according to the April 2000 figures released by PC Data, a market research firm. According to these figures, WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux ranks 5th out of a total of 66 Linux products sold in the U.S. retail market, based on total revenue.
In addition, PC Data figures show Corel's share of the Linux market continued to rise in April. Corel had 22.6 per cent of the U.S. retail market share -- based on sales of Corel LINUX OS and WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux -- compared to 15.7 per cent in March. Corel is ranked second only to Red Hat(tm) when tracking the share of revenues from Linux sales in the U.S. retail market (PC Data Retail Software Report -- April 2000).
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
FWIW, while I prefer to use open source solutions there is nothing wrong with using a commercial/closed/proprietary solution if it works. It's all a matter of getting the job done. This takes precedence over my zealotism in most cases.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
The solution I found for this is to distribute your documents to your clients as PDF (provided they don't have to edit it anymore).
PDF is both a *ix-friendly format and a document type that can be read by nearly all users.
I'm not familiar with the "whole programmer's stone mapper/packer thing." Could you please explain what it is?
In the long run none of that will matter. The cost of switching is in the short run. The long run will only see benefits.
My wife recently started work at Sun, and previously to being hired had never touched a Unix box (her experience was mainly Mac, w/ limited Win). Yes, she was confused by CDE for the first week, and had a bit of difficulty getting used to StarOffice vs MS Office, but it was not at all cataclysmic. Much as I love her, she is *not* someone I would consider inherently computer savvy. However, she is getting comfortable with Solaris, something I highly encourage her to do.
/.ers who think otherwise.
The point is (I hope) that Sun would go out of business if the cycle were really unbreakable. As would Apple, SGI, and everyone else who used non-windows office suites. People can adapt, albeit some quicker than others, and are getting more and more used to a lack of GUI standards in this day and age of Web-based applications (an excellent point made by an earlier poster).
Arguably one could make the same endless cycle argument for OSes, but obviously there are quite a few
just my blog and pix
'and when the people in the building held up the sign saying "you are in a helicopter" the pilot said "aha, we're over the Microsoft campus - only they give you an answer which is technically correct while providing absolutely no information" and safely landed the helicopter in the fog.'
Agreed. The short-hand phrase I use to describe this is;
Technically accurate, Practically useless.
Right click on some entries in setting dialogs, and it too easy to find some real world examples of this.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Too much tech support for you. Need vacation.
--Hail Mary, for she has the largest shotgun of them all.--
Most people can't drive. Ever been to New Jersey? And you expect them to learn how to set their IP address in Windows? The same fuckers who cut you off on the on-ramp to the Garden State Parkway? Who drive 30mph in the passing lane, and give you the finger when you pass them on the right? Fuck 'em all.
What were we talking about again?
--Hail Mary, for she has the largest shotgun of them all.--
No, only a few.
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Is there anyone out there know of a project underway (preferably opensource!) designing a powerpoint replacement (yes, I'm looking at the only thing mentioned here thus far (halfbrain?), and it does not look like it does what I want/need).
Here's what I want to do - at the church I go to we are going to switch to a powerpoint presentation of the songs, rather than overheads. But, I'd like to be able to jump ahead in case they decide to skip a song or a verse or whatever. Probably also need to jump back, in case they repeat something.
Anybody working on something like this? Or do I have to do it myself???
Anybody want to start such a project???