Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Office Faces British Invasion
jdkane writes "CNet reports that a small British software maker, Ability, plans to challenge one of Microsoft's most profitable markets by selling its low-cost package of productivity applications in North America.
Ability Office faces competition from Corel's Word Perfect, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice package and OpenOffice, it's free, open-source sibling. None of these products have captured a significant share of the market from Microsoft's Office.
Does anybody have any hands-on experience with the Ability Office suite, or are there any general speculations as to why this move will make a difference in the office software market (if not just for the bottom line of the software company)?"
I first used Ability office a good few years ago and I found it to be very fast and use less resources than the likes of MS Office. However I feel Ability has very strong competition from the likes of OpenOffice.org, which in my personal opinion is much better and "polished" although Ability's interface is a lot better for those brought up on MS Office.
My other sig is crap too
The first thing I noticed is just how much it looks like Microsoft Office. With that degree of visual compatibility, you could probably drop it in place with MS Office and users not even notice the difference....
Looks like we actually have a competitor now guys..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I tried a free trial of it a while ago (came on the front of a magazine). It was usable, but not as good as OpenOffice. Unfortunately, after installing it, I was unable to print anything from any application, and opening Control Panel would cause a system crash. It seems that the program was installing dodgy system controls. Hopefully that's fixed now... I'm MS-free now, though, so I guess I'll never know...
Regardless of what people think about it, MSaccess is still a staple of databases for business for the 'average guy'.
A business does not run on spreadsheets alone..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You can read a (very favourable) review of Ability Office here. In their monthly "best buys" guide, they actually rated it above Microsoft Office 2002.
http://wvware.sourceforge.net/
.doc formats. It is used both by Abiword and Kword. Try it today, and in the unlikely event one of your documents dosen't import, You can report it so the library can improve.
This an open source library for Reading and writing
The biggest task in breaking the Office monopoly is the file formats, so help break it.
A German company called Softmaker is also working on an Office compatible suite. They have the word-processor done at this point (TextMaker). The benefit for a lot of us is that there are Windows/Linux/FreeBSD(!) versions.
I had never heard of them either, but I gave the free trial a spin, and it's a heck of a lot faster than OO. The Word import capability isn't quite as good as OO, but it's more than acceptable for most docs (and being improved).
I'm not connected to the company in any way, but I am a customer of the Linux version.
GRH
Forms, mail merges, standard letters are all there under the AutoPilot.
Open the data navigator and you have tables and queries including QBE grids just like in Access. Reports are now present in OO 1.1.
Users with ZERO training and no experience of Access would find equal problems getting things going. I would suggest that users with zero training should not be doing table design, queries or reports. I know from bitter experience that the results of allowing this are frequently an unmanageable mess.
OO *is* ready to replace MS - I have used it for exactly this in commercial organisations.
it's not that open office can or cannot support drm. it is that it makes it a fellony to develope technoligy that makes it compatable with microsofts closed source drm.
this means that you either need to licenes this tecknoligy from microsoft and find a way to recoupe the charges from the customer, wich may drive the cost above that of a microsoft product. if they even decide to license it (they aren't as of yet) or you will face jailtime and severe fines for trying to compete with microsoft.
this isn't about inovation and security. it is about useing the market dominance to stop competition from being able to compete with them. there has always been ways to secure documents in the same way the microsoft drm does the diference is that the otherways allow you to view them (with the intended drm features)from competing software like lotus, open office,star office and so on.
you alway could and still have the option to include these types of measures with third party ( sometime free) software. drm is just a new sugger coated marketing name for previous teck in this area.
drm isn't a bad thing. but since office 2003's drm is by default desinged to lock out the competition because you control the majority of the market place and the competition is starting to produce software that rivals performace of thier own products is a bad thing.
can you imagine actually using an inferior product than what is availible for possibly less money and broader lincensing options because you can view somone's file from another companie? well you already do that today but but it will be more noticable in the future after this is in place for a couple of years.
On that note, the StarOffice and OpenOffice SDK now has support for Python development.
StarOffice and OpenOffice also support StarBASIC (built-in VBA syntax compatible), C++, Java, as well as Python.
Adding Python, though, has shown that the base API needs to be cleaned up to make it simpler. I expect interesting things to happen on this end between now and the next release, though it's usable right now.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Yes I understand the reports and forms must be designed.. The point was that it can be done by an untrained employee with no help from IT. ( if they even have an IT guy, most small compaines just don't have one on staff.. ). My entire post was from that angle, the untrained basic user.
MSAccess doesn't require any manual coding to get a table created, a data entry form, couple of queries, then a report. All it takes for them is just a bit of patience and a LOT of mouse movements to get something useable.....
To do this is more 'traditional' environments would require some training and actual coding..
Access doesn't *require* this...
No, MSAccess isn't the most efficient way to do things, yes there are better more traditional ways, yes 'we' would do it differently.... but you cant expect a 7 dollar an hour secretary ( just an example, I'm not slamming secretaries, they just have other things to deal with that are valuable ) to be doing 'real' coding.. To do it "right" would take someone with knowledge and experience, which a *lot* of small companies just can't afford. So they use MSAccess and 'get by'.
I don't see how you can say creating a web form in PHP is as easy as dragging around a couple of widgets in MSAccess... ( again remember the user I'm basing this discussion off of, they have NO clue of what you are talking about doing )
As a side comment, with proper use of record locking you can have more then one user in a jet database at a time.. ( without extensive coding.. ), but I agree that it might be a bit more advanced then the 'average user' can handle creating using just the GUI and no added VBA code....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's not totally true. ROI is not always cheaper "going with what you know". I've converted offices from MS Office to OOo with custom web access database forms, etc. Yes, my consulting fee is probably a little higher than the initial buy-in cost of MS-Office; but that fee comes with training for employees, and, as I've implied, custom web based business software (customer/products/sales/tech). The trend I've noticed is that it's easier to train a person to go to a page (site) select the group they need, log into that group, and work from there (ie. tech support logging into tech, and pulling the latest unresolved trouble tickets to resolve them; and Cron archiving finished trouble tickets every hour).
A big problem with going with the "corporate standard" is lock-in, forced upgrades, and the associated problems when all people in the loop don't upgrade.
A case in point would be a previous client of mine. This company had developers that liked to be cutting edge, and ran a service for thousands of clients buying and selling parts (not an auction house -- a vendor to vendor sales service). The biggest problem we faced were various versions of Office! Part of my job was to make sure that files clients sent in were imported into a database in near real-time -- after they were reviewed and saved in a uniform format (see comment lower down), the problem arose because of the various versions of Excel (their customers' most common file format -- XLS). The final solution was to stop using MS to make these imports and host the data -- we moved all of the database and import software off MS, put the DB in PostgreSQL and wrote a Perl importer. Worked like a dream, and was able to handle all office imports (including DBF and MDB files). Prior to this move, there were two people assigned to review the files, and save them in a uniform version -- this consumed about 12 business hours a day (they both had other official duties that had to be neglected), after the importer was done, they no longer even received the emails with the files -- their workload was combined, and one person was all that was needed. They converted internally to OOo, and send out everything in PDF now. The ROI for this client was best served with the cheapest office product because of the various versions of the "corporate standard" that are out there. Training took no longer than training on a new version of MS Office would have taken, and the buy-in was much lower; in addition, they no longer needed to use the office suite to access the SQL Server (MS-SQL 7.0), and no longer needed to do database edits by hand (a BIG no-no anyway). The office solution alone only saved them a few thousand dollars, but the combined savings (12 billed hours daily, licensing, uptime, customer service, costs associated with system growth because of more customers/records) allowed them to take a considerable saving, and a REAL and VISIBLE ROI.
You can also make PDFs by printing to a postscript file, and converting using ps2pdf (a script included with Ghostscript). I've found that OpenOffice's PDF exported has trouble with embedded EPS images - the final PDF just has a red box with the EPS title and date, instead of the image. Exporting to postscript then converting to PDF fixes this problem.
Migent was the US-based company put together by the U.S. and Canadian investors to market it, and Ashok's later invention, the serial-port-powered pocket modem.
I still have a copy of the old DOS version, and one of these days I'm going to get to England, and will make a point to visit the new Ability team. In my opinion they've doen a fine job, very clean and in the spirit of the original.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net