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Office Delayed, Too
turnitover writes "And you thought calling it 'Office 2007' was just to make it seem all future-like -- but according to eWEEK.com's Mary Jo Foley, turns out calling it is truth in advertising: Office 2007 won't ship until 2007. What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?"
Always underpromise. It's not important to overdeliver, but it's very important to underpromise. And hedge. Always hedge.
Always tell the truth. It doesn't have to be the whole truth, but it is important that what you say be 100% verifiable.
Not until there is reported improvement in load times. For God's sake, how can one be expected to wait for 47 seconds for OpenOffice.orgs's writer to load a 1.7Mb document with 23 pages and 6 images? It's insane! I will not say what the other application takes but I'm sure every slashdotter knows what I am talking about.
You forgot this one.
No because no salesperson came by from open office and gave them a rolex/airplane tickets/golf clubs.
evil is as evil does
KOffice is looking pretty impressive aswell lately.
Where are OpenOffice's collaboration features which rival the office system?
Now, this entire setup requires eating the dogfood, drinking the poison, going the full hog, whatever, BUT, with office 12 + sharepoint V3 + LCS:
1. I am assigned a new project. I open our intranet, go to the projects site, and instantly create a new site with about 4 clicks.
2. I add my fellow team members to said site.
3. I write a design document and add it to a document library.
4. "Jim" loads up said document and looks at it. He has a question. There, IN OFFICE, is a sidebar showing that I'm online, and that I wrote the document. He clicks on me to chat in realtime about the document.
4a. Jim raises some good points, which I can't answer, so with 2 clicks he opens a discussion group about said document.
4b. Through 10 versions (tracked), and many discussions, the team comes to a final decision. We close the document discussion site and merge our changes back into the base document on the project site.
5. We start into the project. Frank now has to go onsite, with no internet access for 3 weeks. He takes his notes document off of sharepoint and saves it locally (this is what requires V3).
5a. Frank comes back 3 weeks later, plugs in, and is asked if he wants to resync with the project site. He does, and we see his updates.
6. 9 months later, the project finishes. Admins click it into read-only mode, so that we have our documents, chats, discussions, lists, etc, but cannot change them.
7. 6 months later the site is backed up and purged off of live storage.
Throughout this experience we can collaborate on documents through LCS + sharepoint + office12, take things offline, click-create project sites, etc.
Tell me an opensource solution which matches this as seamlessly.
I'm all for openoffice, and run linux at home, but office12 is something special. Is it worth the price? Possibly not. Are the entire front + back office system's features matched ANYWHERE? No.
Yes, you can run *nuke + jabber + openoffice + openxcange +..... but do they work together? Can I set up a *nuke site which links into jabber and openexchange and openoffice, so that I can see inside a document whether the creator and other relevant people are online, and have versioned discussions with them?
What are you talking about, "failures?" When was .net dropped? That MS didn't build Windows out of it is not a failure and it would be stupid to do so. People regularly, begrudgingly even, talk about nice and easy it is to develop applications in .net. MSN? Who do you think is running their Windows Live ambitions? That they aren't trying to get people to use walled-garden online services that are losing popularity isn't a failure. They are adapting to the market. And Windows on mobiles? Excuse me, but hasn't the share of WM on smartphones steadily increased year after year? Hell, there is even a Palm (rumored?) running Windows mobile. If that isn't raging success, I don't know what is.
Yes, that Windows and now Office were delayed is crap and heads should roll (not so much for Office) but the things you are calling failures are everything but.
Knowledge is valuable. Ignorance is dangerous. Censorship is unacceptable. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10
Excel is the linchpin of MS-Office. Corporate finance analysts around the world are deeply wedded to it with workbook templates that mesh with core financial planning, forecasting, and reporting systems. Why? Because predicting the future requires flexible models and what-ifs that mesh with detailed historical results.
.... ?
So when will adapter add-ins be available for Open Office from PeopleSoft, Hyperion, JDEdwards, Oracle financial apps,
Open office stuff may work fine for casual emailers and memo writers, but it is the bean counting that runs the show.
Back_2_tech
That said, what are the chances of OpenOffice.Org actually improving radically? As much as I admire the people who put effort into improving it, the project gives me the impression of something like Netscape 4, which was like the engine of Netscape 3 with lots of band-aid features stuck over its face that made it act slower, inconsistent with itself, unstable, and generally buggy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like there's so much legacy code and design in OpenOffice that it's difficult to implement important changes. In essence, and I'd be happy to be proved wrong, it seems like a big ancient application built on legacy design that's only going downhill and will inevitably be overtaken by others if it hasn't been already.
I've been put off OpenOffice for some time now because it won't (cleanly) compile as a native 64 bit application. I was looking forward to the 2.0 release because I'd been led to believe that the incompatibilities were being ironed out specifically for that release, and then it would compile as a 64 bit application, but on release that unfortunately wasn't the case. Searching further, I discovered that the OpenOffice code was apparently still so messy from the Sun days that it simply hadn't been feasible to port to a 64 bit app in any reliable way, and probably wouldn't be for a long time to come.
If OpenOffice had nice and easy-to-maintain code, I would have thought that a 64-bit build would have been as easy as a recompile -- perhaps with a couple of unforseen bug-fixes here and there. The problem is that something as basic as native 64-bit compilation is yet another thing that was never in the original design brief, and trying to patch it in later is a horrible task. I'm not an OpenOffice.Org developer, so if someone knows otherwise about this I'm keen to know.
OpenOffice is convenient to have right now because it provides an 80% replacement for a lot of what MS Office does. Many people looking to switch might be able to use it as a drop-in replacement if their requirements aren't too complex. It's still a mammoth and heavily complex system with considerably dead weight, though, and unfortunately it's not particularly bug free.
Personally, I've found it much easier to go with the more light-weight open source office apps, which aren't trying to be mammoth applications. Lately I've been using the likes of AbiWord, KWord, Gnumeric, and so on, and I've found them to be much more responsive, integrated with my system, and generally more stable than either OpenOffice or MS Office would be. (Actually I can't test MS Office on my system because it's not Windows, so I'm comparing it with MS Office on a typical Windows system.)
The lighter-weight open source apps don't do as much as OpenOffice or MS Office, but they do enough to keep me satisfied. Unfortunately this isn't an option for most people who are locked into Microsoft Office for things like specialised code and plugins and various desktop integration stuff, but then neither is OpenOffice. eg. Supporting something like OpenOffice at my current work is completely out of the question, simply because it won't integrate with our document management systems, despite ODMA (Open Document Management API) being an open API that's existed for ages and is supported by the bulk of DMS products. (MS Office doesn't cleanly support ODMA either, but it's popular enough that it gets special attention from the DMS vendors.)
A thousand pardons sir, I had no idea you took your MS Office versioning so seriously and personally.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
If your like me and a power user of Excel some of these should catch your eye and almost force an upgrade especially the new row and column limits.
The total number of available columns in Excel
Old Limit: 256 (2^8)
New Limit: 16k (2^14)
The total number of available rows in Excel
Old Limit: 64k (2^16)
New Limit: 1M (2^20)
Number of levels of sorting on a range or table
Old Limit: 3
New Limit: 64
The maximum length of formulas (in characters)
Old Limit: 1k characters
New Limit: 8k characters
The number of levels of nesting that Excel allows in formulas
Old Limit: 7
New Limit: 64
Number of rows allowed in a Pivot Table
Old Limit: 64k
New Limit: 1M
Number of columns allowed in a Pivot Table
Old Limit: 255
New Limit: 16k
Open Office really isn't that great. It's a good transition piece of software that will hopefully get people away from Office's closed formats, but I can't see it being used for the long term. However, right now, it's the closest thing to office as far as support for their file formats. So it's playing a very important role. Trying to be an open source version of Microsoft's garbage.
There is a much more fundamental problem that needs to be cured before we can evolve to the lightweight likes of abiword and kword. People using their office suite for things they shouldn't. It's that simple. It is almost like the whole business world learned one piece of software and decided they would do _everything_ with it. In college I had to take an Office class. The entire book was written in Word. It was possibly the most poorly published book I've ever seen. Square peg in a round hole. There are much better tools for that sort of thing. What about when people send you a single picture as a word file. Try to do their whole payroll on a spreadsheet. Create webpages in Word. Use their email as ftp. Don't even get me started on Powerpoint...
To get back to the point... If people actually used their Office productivity suite for what it was meant for, then they wouldn't be tied so tightly to Office. But they are dumb, and their entire way of using computers are based on a house of cards. And they will be stuck with Office. Hopefully they will find a way out with Open Office and evolve to Abiword and Kword.
If the "business" people I've dealt with are any indication, then that trend isn't going away. Their attitude is "but we've always done it this way". Just because you've always done it that way doesn't make it the right way...
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.