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StarOffice 6.0 Beta Available
Lumpish Scholar and 753 other people wrote in to let us know that Sun has released its beta of Star Office 6. CNET has a blurb about the release as well. I was hoping that Sun's site might be unclogged enough to try it out myself, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards today.
Would you expect Microsoft to do anything less
How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work????
Parsing isn't that hard most of the difficulty comes in getting all the different OLE objects embedded in the document to work. Star/Openoffice, Koffice, AbiWord can all format the fonts, layouts, etc, quite well. The problem comes when you have an Excel Spreadsheet embedded in the word document as a table. Then each cell of the excel table is a word document. Then you gotta think about Macros, VB, etc.
Getting these things to work right is hard even for microsoft. Where I work now I have an Access database (I should've demanded they use something else, but they already had it installed everywhere) deployed to over 20 sites. I wrote the database in Access 97, but making it work in Access 2000 can be very tricky. Not only that, but at some places some of the Visual Basic Modules won't work in 97... welcome to my hell...
Anyway the point being, Microsoft has trouble in making THEIR office read previous MS Office files. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for someone who doesn't have the specs to make an app capable of reading them.
Try Insight from bynari[bynari.net]. They make both a client (Insight) and a server (Insight Server). The client can talk to an Exchange server, and includes calendar, addressbook, and email, just like outlook, but on Linux. The server is feature-compatible with Exchange, and is built on exim, openldap, and cyrus IMAP/POP. Outlook clients can talk to the Insight server just fine, even transparently. I am demoing it right now, and it might just replace Exchange here, and allow me to run Linux exclusively.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
Here's Microsoft's Plans for XML. I think it's very interesting how they word things:
m /xmloffice.htm
.. People have been able to export Access & Excel documents to tab deliminated files for years now. Thats why they're not worried about XLM for those apps. People can already do whatever they want to spreadsheet files, etc..
Customers need to be more pissed off at Microsoft so they force Word to use XML.
http://www.microsoft.com/Office/developer/platfor
Because of the many benefits associated with the use of XML, customers have demanded easy, robust support for XML, and Microsoft has answered them. Currently, Microsoft is concentrating on Microsoft Access and Excel--the applications in which XML can have the biggest impact.
Access and EXCEL? They just want to keep Word as proprietary as possible. Word is the one people can't get in or out of. Of course they don't want to focus on XML for Word. Jeash
Tell you what...do what I did a few years ago, when I wanted to know why my nice beefy NT workstation was eating most of my memory, with no services running:
Install NT4. Note the available memory on bootup, before doing anything.
Install Office. Note the available memory after bootup, but before doing anything.
Do the math and wonder why JUST installing Office significantly decreased the available memory on bootup.
Start Office. Wonder why the used memory doesn't increase much at all. Hmmmmm.
A black box approach to be sure, but still very interesting.
jf
Personally, I wouldn't even say bundling is the issue with me - for me it is their shoddy business practices (rolls back to 1994 or so):
1. The internet is slowly being brought to the masses. Windows 3.1 exists, but need the WinSock TCP/IP stack to get in the net - fortunately, a free version is available, and is included by ISPs. Mosaic is also included...
2. Netscape builds and releases a much improved "Mosaic", called Navigator. Microsoft yawns, sees it all as a "fad", that the consumer won't embrace.
3. 1995 rolls around, and the consumer is raving mad for the net - Bill looks around and screams WTF!? Netscape is raking in money from sales of Navigator, creates Communicator which adds email, news, and web site creation tools.
4. In a mad dash, Bill throws out Windows 95, which had been worked on for a while, but had no internet capability (AFAIK). Rushes to make a TCP/IP stack (probably bought WinSock, knowing him).
5. Bill then sees that the internet explosion isn't a fad, and that he must "posess" it - rapidly IE is created, and is released for free to the masses.
At this point, things go crazy - because while Netscape isn't free - it is, sorta - but people for some reason are too stupid (or honest?) to figure it out: Netscape is "free" for students - simply check the student box on the download form, and you can download it for free - no authentication or anything required. Still, most people see it as expensive, and the marketing/FUD is done for IE to point out how expensive Netscape was (which it really wasn't that expensive - $70.00 or so for the deluxe version).
6. MS then "bundles" IE with later copies of 95, then fully integrates it into 98 - thus sealing the fate of Netscape, which went on to become a footnote (yes, I know it still exists, etc - but in the whole scheme of things, Netscape is just the tool, and not the company it was any longer).
It is this major undercutting that is a bad business practice - they saw that such software was cheap and easy to make, and thus had no "real" value, unlike an office package. But that doing so would leverage them into a whole new market, a much larger possible market - to market that office software to.
Now, Sun is doing the same thing - who knows if it is for revenge over Java or what - or if _they_ have some ulterior motive (which they probably do), which would allow them to leverage into another market...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
At the other end of the problem, the free software community is in dire need of a Samba-like clone of Exchange's MAPI abilities.
Right now, Linux still makes a better server than it does a desktop. I've replaced NT file/print servers with Samba+Linux; I've used PostgreSQL+Linux instead of MS SQL Server; but there is no way to replace an NT Exchange server with anything and still take advantage of Outlook's sweet MAPI groupware functionality.
I just don't understand why there isn't a free software Exchange clone out there. I'll tell you what - Exchange aint cheap; if a stable replacement existed for *nix, it would be one less reason for anyone to run NT Server.
Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to do it.