Slashdot Mirror
Sun to Offer Support for OpenOffice.org
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge.com [ed. note: Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN] is reporting that Sun announced today they will offer both free and for-pay support for OpenOffice.org. The story says the cost will be about the same as that it is charging for StarOffice, the proprietary cousin of OO.org."
Each time I demonstrate Open Office to a friend, they are surprised that such an interoperable (With MS Office) office suite exists. My favorite is to provide them with a copy of the Open CD, which has a number of free and Open Source Software distributions.
*
troll blacklist. Please mo
This means they don't have to spend as much money on usability testings... Use the customers for feedback.
This is one thing that will help companies except open source is support. Companies are scared of open source to some degree as if something like OO goes wrong there is no-one who can offer support there and then.
Its nice to have someone to speak to on the phone who know what they are talking about as well as sometimes having someone to blame
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
To be honest, I can't imagine what kind of support you need for an office suite once it is install (maybe that's it!), however, if this means the leary will consider OpenOffice, woo hoo! I work in education and OpenOffice has allowed once-useless donated computers to become a real tool without massive costs for licenses.
This is a good thing, though. Not because the Sun support will really help all that many folks, but because of the appearance of legitimacy it lends to OOO.
And a big plus: it flips a solar middle finger at Microsoft. Jyahh!
sigs, as if you care.
Maybe OOo comes with your linux distribution or your XP pre-installed machine and you don't want to fuss with installing Star Office.
probably very few people will opt for a support program, but that doesn't matter. in the corporate it world it often doesn't matter if you actually get the support package, just that there is one to get.
the logic is pretty simple, really - if a company is willing to support a product, it means the product is supportable, ie there is enough q-and-a done that the software is fit enough for the support department not to have to do so much work that it loses money.
lots of companies will only buy wares that have support, even if they never get the support itself.
2 1337 4 u!
No offense, but the two products are so similar that it wouldn't be too difficult to learn how do do things yourself. The ONLY major setback would be if your class utilized the scripting language of Office (in my experience, most Office-centric intro classes don't do this.)
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
there is always the "hmm MS Office is higher quality"
PHBs don't live with Logic.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If OO competes too well with M$word, then Micro$oft is likely to make their next version incompatible with OO or incompitable enough that people will be reluctant to switch. Then there's "shovel wear", the mass of M$ stuff that they charge you for (it's in the price for that new computer) but they pretend is free, which fools the masses into believing the only reason to use OO or other non-M$ wear is to save a buck.
-Turnip Onion --- Neither micro nor $oft. Linux is a fine tool.
Do you think the actual phone support reps will be in India? Just curious, not that its a bad thing... There have been a lot of slashdot stories about open source projects over there lately and it would seem to make sense.
SCO: 800-726-8649
Verisign: 800-361-8319, 888-642-9675
Diebold: 800-433-VOTE (8683)
A true PHB will NEVER run out of excuses, they'll just constantly come up with wierder and stupider ones.
My latest stonewall to implementing something quality vs. something venduh:
"We are pushing to remove all freeware because of liability concerns."
Which translates to:
"Even though we have hundreds of trial-expired, unlicensed copies of Winzip, countless installations of Acrobat Reader, numerous installations of unlicensed trial versions of system tools, IIS, etc., we're not going to let you install PostgreSQL for development testing because we're idiots and our heads are filled with warm, tasty tapioca pudding."
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
StarOffice is Sun's product, designed for businesses; OpenOffice is what individuals use at home (why pay when there's no real difference?). Sun wants people to be comfortable with StarOffice and perhaps suggest/demand/support its use in offices, so what they're doing is supporting the home users of the almost identical home counterpart.
Basically, they're encouraging people to use a free product at home so that they can charge for it in the office. It's a very smart move.
GL
Sooner or later, MS is going to integrate MS Office into their operating system (in the name of enhancement)... deja vu... all over again..
Nice troll, but in case you haven't noticed most of these Office programs are a lot more complicated than your average everyday application. You could probably spend weeks learning how to use the various features of Word alone. Sure, if you're going to use it as a plain text editor it may seem easy, but once you start getting into advanced formatting and embedding objects into the documents it gets much more complex for the average person.
Microsoft does provide free online support via their online Knowledge Base. Sun will no doubt provide something very similar.
In many cases, I think the real reason companies, or managers, to be more specific, don't want to use free alternatives is simple CYA. Suppose a company buys a software package that doesn't work as advertised, say, from Microsoft. In a case like that, who catches hell from upper management? Not the manager who approved the purchase. Microsoft, or at least the sales rep, catches hell. This doesn't mean there'll be a satisfactory resolution to the situation, but it decreases the likelihood that the person who appreoved the purchase will get in hot water.
Suppose, OTOH, that a manager decides to go with OpenOffice on the advice of one of us here. Will OO.o work as well as MS Office? Most likely, yes, but that manager, who probably doesn't have much experience with it, will develop ulcers worrying about what might happen to him if something goes wrong. If he has money that he can spend on MS Office, he'd rather do that than get called on the carpet for trying to take the cheap way out and making a huge mess of things.
If you want to advocate open source alternatives in a business environment, you have to do so in a way that will present little risk that anyone's job security will be on the line. Making the software available for people to take home might be a good plan, as would be installing it on machines with no equivalent commercial software installed. For instance, at a company I worked for, the computers in our call center had no word processing software installed, and management was adamant that pirated software would not be tolerated. So, when some of us techs needed to write up a support manual, someone suggested StarOffice, which was then downloaded and installed. Many people had never heard of it, but it definitely made a good impression. Turns out that we were closed down before the software had a chance to spread to other desktops, but many people were exposed to it, and good exposure never hurts.
What I'd really like to see is some of the low-end PC makers bundling OpenOffice with their machines. This would add value to the machines in the minds of consumers, and it'd get the program some extra exposure. eMachines, Systemax, are you listening?
If support was really the only issue, why didn't you go with Star Office, which has support?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
this is the one thing he has been using against me for not adapting open office and sticking with microsoft. finally support is here and he is out of excuses
.
An easy way to wipe MS Office is to inform the BSA about all the piracy that goes on...
A few nasty letters from the BSA and OpenOffice looks wonderfull
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
It would be something of a desparation move if they did. Right now, OSes and Office suites provide two distinct and large profit streams. It is common opinion that Windows and Office are the only things making MS money. In any case, that is where they make most of their money.
Sure they could integrate at least a significant portion of Office into Windows to kill nascent competition. But this would reduce them to one primary profit center that would be smaller than the two separate ones. I suppose they could sell an "Advanced Office Funtionality" package but it wouldn't be as profitable. It couldn't be. They would have to integrate at least as much functionality as OpenOffice provides and not significantly raise the price of Windows.
It might even make things easier on their competition. Since OpenOffice functionality becomes the basic benchmark, their competitors would know to explicity target the what the "Advanced Functionality" product provides.
If nothing else, such an integration move would tell me that Open and StarOffice have caused MS significant pain.
The manager in charge of a deployment of an office suite would be better served by:
Of course, this presumes that management will support the time and money needed to PLAN and TRAIN, which in today's economy doesn't happen as often as it should. Kinda hard to hold someone's hand when you are working your help desk shift 13 timezones away in India.
YMMV.
--rc
I don't think anybody argues that MS office is higher quality. The question is this. "Is it worth the extra quality?" In other words "is OO good enough for me to save a couple of hundred thousand dollars with?"
War is necrophilia.
I'm a computer consultant and I see a lot of bugs with MS Office too. Of course when Word screw up a document it's the computer's fault, not MS Office...
.doc to .rtf... Word was screwing up big time so I used OpenOffice in order to open the .doc and save them as .rtf (checked the documents back into Word and they were ok).
Also when you use OpenOffice DON'T save in the Microsoft file format. The filters are not perfect and sooner or later, you'll lose your formatting. Oh, and before you start complaining, MS Office filters are far worse than the ones in OpenOffice : last week I had to save several
It's really simple. When using any program the only way to keep formatting intact is to use that program's own format. Saving only to MS formats from OO is like saving your multi-layered photoshop projects only to jpeg.
we come in peace / shoot to kill
The best manager I ever worked for bucked the system, did the planning up front including confirming his moves with his staff and BAM! Win, win, win. He rarely had things blow up in his face unexpectedly - "measure twice, cut once" was his work ethic, which spread infectiously to those who worked with him. He was so successful that the company considered him nothing short of a "fixer" like the guy in Pulp Fiction. Whenever some dept. needing saving or near resurrecting, he would get the call. He was assigned to lead Development, QA, IT and Production/Operations all in the span of 3 years and he turned each and every unit around into a new, well-functioning entity. The company survived likely because of him.
So, yeah I understand why it happens. I just think it's time that American business grew up and learned how to manage itself a lot better than it typically does. Otherwise, it ultimately might be its undoing...
--rc