Slashdot Mirror
NZ Outfit Dumps Open Office For MS Office
(Score.5, Interestin writes "The NZ Automobile Association has just announced that it is dropping Open Office and switching back to MS Office. According to their CIO, 'Microsoft Office is not any cheaper, but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing because of issues such as incompatibility and training.' In addition, 'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'" About 500 seats are involved. MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I thought I just caught a whiff of kickback...
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
for the flame war
Now before we all agree that they suck and start the conspiracy of how much MS paid them to switch back... Perhaps they have some valid points here. What can the Linux movement do to curb the switchbacks, and address some of these concerns?
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
We also trialled OpenOffice here at my workplace as an alternative. The incompatibility issues were the real killer. Microsoft Office is the de facto standard, so any deviations away from that are going to be difficult. In the end we too settled on Microsoft. It's just the logical choice.
What does Linux have to do with this story?
Anyway, I don't see what the big deal is. Perhaps the folks that make OO.o can learn something from this and give potential customers some kind of assurance that their product will still be around/supported/updated for the foreseeable future.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
All roads lead to $$$$$
it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing
Sounds like there's a disconnect between the IT staff and the business side of the house. Any CIO worth their salt would have had before-and-after metrics to compare.
"'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'"
Perhaps someone should send them this: Open Office Roadmap
I don't think it could be any more clear or easier to find....
Get a web developer
Expensive upgrades shoved down your throat by forced upgrades due to designed incompatibilities with previous versions? Why can't newer versions of office access all the older versions?
"In addition, you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future."
Why do I think the exact opposite? I have more faith in ODF being supported by multiple apps, say, twenty years from now.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
"A roadmap for the future" ??? You're just as much at the mercy of M$ as you to the OO.o developers. What kind of security can one kind in M$'s supposed "roadmap for the future". Bah!
What, then, might this page be about?
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
But OpenOffice has a long, long way to go. The fit and finish, polish and performance of Microsoft Office to this point, is unparalleled. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but I'm not a Microsoft hater either. I'm just a realist.
When OpenOffice can step up its interface, design, compatibility, and market share, then we might have something to talk about. But as we sit right now, Microsoft Office is the only game in town that does what it does.
It only helps Microsoft to build products on top of Office, like Sharepoint, Project, etc... because they leverage an already existing knowledge of the UI and functionality. Office 2007 is a drastic departure from prior versions, but as I have been using it since the RTM date, it's been rock solid and I'm exceptionally pleased at how much more intelligent it has gotten, in particular with Excel and figuring out what I want to do, or in Word with how I'm formatting a document.
I still am hoping for a kickass version of OpenOffice though, just so that Microsoft doesn't rest on its laurels. Office 2007 indicates that they did anything but, and the polish of that product is something that I'm very surprised by, especially by Microsoft. Kudos to them for this round.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Sounds like someone got lazy. Plus MS pretty much threw in 500 licenses for free (for home use).
I didn't know that such deals could be made. Sounds like it's time to talk to my software rep and renegotiate our licensing scheme.(citing this article of course).
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
From the sounds of it the company seemed to be expecting to basically have MS Office for free. Whenever you switch to a new platform of any sort there's some initial cost of training and converting old documents (macros are the only thing I can think of they'd have to actually convert). I think they're looking at short term cost and ignoring the long term payback.
1. We're going to fix some bugs. If we feel like it.
2. The next version is going to be much more colorful, but will need 4x the memory and CPU power. We're also planning to make a 3D graphics card mandatory.
3. Just when you got comfortable with the present version, we'll stop supporting it. We'd also deactivate it over the internet if we could get away with it.
Apple's not an OS it's a company.
ODF is more important than OpenOffice. If ODF was enforced, then it wouldn't matter what Word Processor that you used.
No one is suddenly going to put all images in an MS only format, they choose more open formats like TIFF/JPG/PNG etc.
...doesn't mean it's cheaper. I am kind of a open-source fanboy myself, but when it came time to either buy Photoshop or spend valuable hours learning to use Gimp, I also opted for the cash-heavy/time-light option.
My employer pays something like $40/hr (I think..I'm salary). So if I spent even 10 hours getting as good with Gimp as I already am with Photoshop, then the closed-source product is cheaper. But I do use all open source at home when time is less important than money.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Well, duh?
I like Openoffice, and I appreciate everything they're doing.
On the other hand, if I could buy MS Office for Linux, I would. It really is just better.
For all that OO tries, it just isn't as compatible with MS Office formats as it needs to be for me to use it. I always have formatting errors with word documents, sometimes I have entire excel spreadsheets that are useless, and I just can't have that.
I have MS office on my powerbook, and I use that for the documents that OO can't handle. I produce the vast majority of documents on there too. If I had Office on Linux, I would use it instead, but I don't.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Yea, those word processors and spreadsheet programs need a good roadmap. Think of how much they have changed since Office 97.
That it's office productivity software. You can generate your own road map.
*Version +1. Just like the current version, but with slightly more features and shiny icons!
*As above.
What are they worried about? That the OpenOffice roadmap might include:
*Given up on office suite. This version is a badger tracking application. Enjoy!
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
When I look at a map, and see that the destination is me getting screwed, I don't feel any better about having said map...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
People would always rather do the familiar than what is good for them, even if the familiar is unpleasant. Sort of like how abused children frequently seek out spouses later in life who will likely abuse them.
Some valid points:
Doug Wilson is the Chief Information Officer, The New Zealand Automobile Association Incorporated
Since then he has been the CEO of a PC company (Gateway) and APL+, a software development company that was a Provenco subsidiary. He has also had senior roles at Microsoft and EDS.
Doug is currently the CIO of the NZ Automobile Association, a new role that was created last year.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
that Slashdot worked "Dumps" in with a Microsoft story. Was it hard to work in "load, deuce, loaf, turd, crap, poo?"
Read his Bio, this is not a suprise, I would wager that this switch has more to do about him and his beliefs than the technology and its benefits and cons involved.
I'm struck by the number of people posting things along the lines of:
Open Office isn't as good because it doesn't do [something] the way MS Office does it
or
OO isn't as good because it won't render MS Office stuff properly.
Now, I have no real preference for either (I have both on my Machine, since the other half needs MS Office to be compatible with a course she's doing, and I had OO originally cause it was free...)
But why are these things that make *Open Office* 'worse'?
Why are there never winges about 'MS Office just doesn't render Open Office format docs properly' or 'MS is rubbish because the tab key behaves differently to OO'?
A lot of people, including AANZ, seem to be confusing familiarity with quality, when it ain't necessarily so...
'Speak softly and carry a beagle'
Apparently they didn't think over the feasibility of their initial migration to OpenOffice.org. Hopefully this taught them the lesson that free as in beer and free as in speech may not be enough.
m ent_id=226219m ent_id=226313m ent_id=226315
I hate to say it, but for an awful lot of people not dealing with the simplest documents OOo is still far from being viable. Moreover, MS compatibility is only a part of the problem, and probably even not the largest one. For example, a good list of what a professional such as a technical writer or translator misses in OOo Writer can be found here:
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&com
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&com
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&com
After actually reading the article, the reasons they switched to MS Office are:
*They weren't sure if it was cheaper or not, so they bought MS Office (again), which guarantees that OOo was cheaper.
*MS told them some stories about future plans that MS may or may not do with MS Office, and OOo didn't.
*Someone wanted to use Word and Sharepoint as a CMS for their website.
*They didn't actually switch 100% to OOo, so there were occasional internal compatibility issues between OOo users and MS Office users. It would also seem that some employees were sending ODF docs to the outside world, and people didn't know what they were.
So, basically, this organization switched back to MS Office because of some formatting issues with MS' undocumented file formats, some features that aren't actually available yet in MS Office looked interesting, and improper use of OOo by employees.
I've heard a lot of reasons to use MS Office instead of OOo, but this looks to be a pretty sorry collection of excuses. So far, the only two that come up in my line of work are lack of training, and poor VBA support. There isn't really any way around the VBA problems at the moment, either.
For some customers, it's important to know how much they're paying, even if not knowing would save them money.
not only is this article plain and simply fud (you could argue *any* piece of software requires training-- and honestly, if you are so *stupid* you can't figure out a word processor, maybe you aren't qualified for the job) it also shouldn't be news every time some company switches to or from MS Office.
Important data tends to be stored in other systems anyway. You probably have a financial system where stuff like payroll data gets stored. I'm seeing more use of wikis for shared documents and that sucks a lot less than passing a word document around like a bong. The MS Office calendar and sending meeting invites is perhaps its strongest capability but even that isn't anything that a company like Google couldn't duplicate easily enough. Perhaps they'd find they'd get more work done if they jettisoned both MS Office AND Open Office and rolled some of their own well integrated tools if there were any gaps left (I doubt there would be, though.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
that the people using these applications aren't the same people who read slashdot. if you've tried supporting microsoft office users you'll quickly realize what a nightmare converting, training, and supporting openoffice for the typical user might be.
Just a couple of days ago I saw on Digg a family tree of all the Linux variations. It is mind boggling. I know that one of the neat things about Open Source software is that people can take the code and go make derivative products. But the problem then becomes that you end up with a million slightly different flavors of the product.
/vague/. Maybe once you get down to the application level it's a bit more solid (I don't know how many flavors of Open Office there are, for example), but it's hard to get past the OS if you want to do it in Linux, for me.
I'm coming up due for another bi-annual wipe of my home PC, and I've been toying with the idea of switching to Linux, with dual-boot to Windows so I can play my games (though that Cedega stuff sounds neat, too). But one of the reasons I've been putting it off is I don't know which Linux to install, and I haven't had time to research all the different choices (and I dread doing the research). I'm leaning towards Ubuntu, because everyone talks about it, but is that really a good reason to pick an OS?
I think part of the problem with getting buy-in to Open Source is it just feels so, I don't know,
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I know nothing about SO, but OO.o is a lot like MS Office. I've heard that macros is one shortcoming in OO.o (although that might be just compatibility), I've used both MS Office and OO.o, on the same machine, even, and I don't have to switch my mental mode when using one versus the other. By comparison, I used WordPerfect before using MS Word, and that did require a mental shift. What makes you think they're not that similar? (Perhaps your point is that OO.o is no less different from MS Office 2003 than Office 2007 is, and there I won't disagree, as I know nothing about the difference between '07 and '03.)
(P.S. The insulting term used by the poster you're responding to was totally uncalled for. I wish such people would learn to control their Tourette's-like typing skills.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Take e.g. Impress. Not so impressive, is it? It is exactly the same crap as Powerpoint. Animations are limited and have the same apparent bugs, like in PP, mathematical text is an ugly hack, editing drawings is a ROYAL pain, including tables is far less than intuitive or user-friendly, it still doesn't support any half-way sane vector image format, and what it renders in presentation view is pure garbage.
It's similar with the word processing and the spreadsheet components, which both appear to precisely identify and emulate the mistakes MS made. The only argument for actually using OOo is that it runs on otehr operating systems than just Windows. Hell, even LaTeX with LyX is far better and far more user-friendly than anything OOo has to offer for what my colleagues and I need to do.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I've tried OpenOffice at my workplace too because I was annoyed with Word's sometimes capricious behaviour. With Word documents that had a lot of tables and some graphics, but no macros. The results were mostly OK, but a few formattings tend to get lost when transferring the documents from Word to ODF.
My impression is that a one time switch to OpenOffice would be OK, the effort to rework the formatting would be less annoying than putting up with Word in the long run. But if you have to maintain both formats in parallel, the compatibility problems will make it worse than just using Word.
So if you go OpenOffice, be prepared to do it all the way.
C - the footgun of programming languages
But, fair is fair. OO.o also let them have 500 seats for free. :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Business makes decision that a bunch of slashdotters don't like.. News at 11.
There's a lot to be learned form their reasons to abandon Open Office, but nah, lets just call them names and plug our ears.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I hate Microsoft. I hate them with a passion. I don't own a single Windows machine.
But OpenOffice.org is an absolute piece of shit compared to Microsoft Office.
Mind you, I use OO.o over Office-- because I'd feel filthy using Office. But I fucking hate the thing. It's bloated, poorly designed, and butt-ugly. Compatibility issues aside-- since I know quite well that reverse-engineering Microsoft's convoluted file formats is far from simple or easy-- OO.o is a crappy program, not the be-all, end-all of word processing that it's marketed as. As quirky as MS Office is, OO.o crosses the line from 'quirky' into 'crappy'.
Frankly, what do I think is the best office suite? Office 97 or 2000. Everything after that just went downhill.
But I digress.
Most of the time, when I have to edit a letter, or a resume, or something else vaguely simple, I just whip open TextEdit. OpenOffice is a bloated sack of crap, MS Office makes me feel like I need to take a bath, and the rest of the contenders for 'best office suite' crown are nonstarters.
When the only serious choices for office suite are 'bloated piece of crap' and 'creepy Microsoft Borgware', it's only due to my distaste for the latter that I use the former. And I avoid even that whenever possible.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
My former boss also gave me the sames excuses as a reason not to use Linux and OpenOffice a while ago. "Training and unknown compatibilities" seem to be the template answer Microsoft provides to the Microserfs to defend their product market$. That's ok. I have a solution to this problem. I no longer provide technical support to Microsoft product. I only provide technical support to Linux. Those that appreciate my expertise in my surroundings only use open-source products because it is the best thing to do for humanity's sake. In fact, I got someone to install firefox, thunderbird, and open-office just yesterday in less than an hour. Learning curve my arsenalgernon.
.
That bloated pointless "Where We are Taking You Today" piece of crap?
Thank you for reminding me why the occasionally unpolished bits of OO are so worth the trouble.
MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
This is unbelievably huge, so much so that I'd be surprised to see this type of concession in the US anytime soon.
The problem here is that both Microsoft Office and the OSS projects that want to replace it are stuck in the 1980s. The Web itself is a word processor, any time that is spent making DOC or ODF documents is wasted, they should be HTML CSS JS from the beginning. Dreamweaver v1.0 in 1998 is a better model for a word processor than 1984 MS Word. There is absolutely nothing that Word can do that a competing writing tool can't implement in Web-native document code and the app would be to Word as Firefox is to Explorer. The user wouldn't have to worry about anybody's software road map because their documents are readable in a Web browser and editable in any Web toolchain. They can shop for tools based on how they want to work not on what literally crazy bundle of mostly unreadable bits the app wants to encode their work into.
I can translate a single Word document into a Mac bundle that holds all the same content in W3C formats. That is what the document should be from the start so it doesn't need to be translated.
This space is wide open because Microsoft has made so little progress. What is the point of cloning that lack of progress? You don't give the user a reason to switch that is big enough, you have the same limitations as MS Office.
I think we need a special CS course that unlearns you all the things you know because of Microsoft. I can't believe humans are naturally this bad at making software. The entire ODF thing is an embarrassment. I probably wouldn't hire someone who used MS Word during the 21st century but any involemwnt with ODF is even worse. At least MS has the excuse of actually being old to go with being obsolete and out of touch.
from Corregidor to Bataan in WWII. I don't think the US and Allied prisoners enjoyed following it much.
Window 95 - the last Consumer OS before merging with NT.
Windows 95 OSR2, ditto.
Windows 98, ditto.
Windows 98 SE, ditto.
Windows ME, yeppers.
Thanks for the precision and accuracy! And for the extra dimensions in the test cases.
Sure, MS provides you a roadmap, but it's for a different city! Even they don't know where the fsck they are going. I was testing a BackOffice product back in the day. They gutted the feature set to get it out the door ahead of the immanent release of NT 5, and only beat it by 18 months.
Forced upgrades through strategic backward incompatibility, useless duplicate licenses because nobody can track the ones that come with OEM pcs. Oh yeah, give it to me.
What a tool.
If you don't want to run it, no-ones going to make you. You get the choice, see ?
.. because everyone talks about it, but is that really a good reason to pick an OS?
... the other differences aren't really that significant, though it suits some commercial outfits to pretend it is.
>>
I guess that would be why you ran Windows ?
>> But the problem then becomes that you end up with a million slightly different flavors of the product.
Well, not a million. Just a handful, like Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/2000 Server/Xp Home/XP Pro
I have the same experience here : I've always been using OpenOffice.org (because I only use Linux at home).
Back with OpenOffice.org 1.x, it was a somewhat good office suite, but still lacked a lot of small details here and there, and there was still a few conversion glitches.
Now, with OpenOffice.org 2.x I really think that OOo has got all the polish it needed to be a production ready suite. I use it regularily at home, for studies or at work place. The fact that I use OOo and some are using MS-Office is completly transparent to me : OOo will flawlessly import or export most of the document I work with.
The only couple of import glitches are due to the font substitution : not all Linux distros come with all Microsoft fonts pre-installed, and OOo tries to map them to the closest equivalent available. Which aren't always pixel-perfect equivalent. And I still manage to occasionally find some document where the author still use the "spacebar-a-the-only-layout-formating-method" either because of lack of basic word processing knowledge (you, the kind for which that knowledge means "where are the most essential buttons in MS-Office Word version 2003
But, apart from that misaligned text and arrows I occasionally found in presentations with sloppy layout, it never looks like I'm using a different office suite than my correspondents.
Also OpenOffice.org is surprisingly crash-free for me even from the earliest versions (compared to what I would expect from the first releases of an open-source software, or what I've experienced with some earlier release of AbiWord or with older versions of MS-Word). Granted, it's not the most responsive and snappy on some complex tasks (importing a sloppily formated 150+ slides PowerPoint presentation), but doesn't crash.
My only personal request : I hope the grammar plug-in will get polished a little bit. Like adding the ability to do on-the-fly corrections. And make it less reliant on a specific implementation of Java so it could be for example compiled to native binary using GCC.
And maybe include it as a standart OpenOffice.org feature (thus also using the OOo interface for dialogs, still faster than java's).
---
Note: I don't have a huge amount of experience with MS-Office. I've used it a lot back in the Windows 3.x days (after an MS-DOS period dominated by MultiMate). After ward, I've been using WordPerfect a lot on Windows (and somewhat Linux), and StarOffice in Linux since it went open-source.
I don't make my comment as someone who can compare OOo to MSO on a daily basis, but as someone who is currently successfully using OOo for *all* my day to day work and don't encounter any difficulty because I'm using OOo instead of what the rest of the population uses the most.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This is a very hackneyed argument. Pick the popular stuff, there is probably a reason those distributions are used much more widely than others. Sure there are 100 million variations of a program that can do X, Y, and Z but there are usually about two or maybe three that are significant. It's the same bullshit with people complaining about Gnome and KDE which I could as two desktop environments and then magically claiming that 2 turns into 1 billion different desktop environments. Go to distro watch, look up the most popular distribution and try it. You don't have to install "Hacked in my Basement" Linux Special Edition. The weaker and unnecessary projects usually die out anyway due to lack of interest. The variations are just human nature, not everyone (especially on Slashdot) is going to like the same thing and then you get forks and variants all over the place. Those usually fall upon the niche they are intended to fill.
It's all about the numbers, baby.
As New Zealanders use British spellings ("harbour" instead of "harbor," "encyclopaedia" instead of "encyclopedia, " "manouevre" instead of "move," "bobby" instead of "pig"), their per-byte cost of any given document is going to be lower than that of Americans, clearly narrowing the cost gap between OOo and Office.
Of course, such savings might be offset by skilful use of British spellings, which may be learnt from your don as long as you don't bunk off too much and end up mincing about with your headmaster.
(And yes, I'm from Chicago and have never been to the UK. I had to look up everything in that second paragraph. How much of a geek am I?)
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Why is it news when 500 pc's change their software? A second question about oo.org. Why don't they do the same thing Microsoft does and just make deals with vendors to preinstall their office on as many pcs as possible?
I've heard Gnumeric is very close to Excel in functionality.
Missing "rotating tables" or something like that according to Wikipedia, but otherwise quite solid if not better than excel.
I'd also give AbiWord, or KOffice a shot instead of OO.o.
And for all you claiming OO.o is bloated: It's not. Open 60 documents in OO.o Writer, and then open 60 in Word. Keep climbing by tens/twenties/whatever. See which crashes first; Word without a doubt. OO.o will keep on running on that initial 128MiB of RAM, and that's how I like it.
I call setbacks on the NZ outfit. That or they're too stupid to re-learn very basic things. ("Ok, instead of Ctrl+3 to format, Ctrl+t" or something) And that's for stuff that needs adjusting. How many "tricks" are there under Word & PowerPoint that can't be done under OO.o?
PS: Calc sucks. We all know. Try to help them out.
There is nothing new in this.
Employees can get a licensed copy of Microsoft Office desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office Professional, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Visio Professional, to install and use on a home computer. The only cost to employees for the Home Use Program benefit is the cost of media (CDs), shipping, and handling. Volume Licensing: Home Use Program
Employees are encouraged to discontinue use of the software on termination of their employment, but there has never been a mechanism in place to enforce the rules.
If you work for the NHS you can order Office 2007 on-line for a S&H cost of eighteen pounds, Microsoft Home User Programme
Okay. I have customers with 80 workstations all over RHEL+oo.o and they work FINE. We are based in Mexico and, I dont know, perhaps I am mistaken here, i would think New Zealand would have at least as good an IT market as the one we have here.
My point is that if my clients can find a good Open Source company to train them and make FOSS work for them, why couldnt this guy?
Well... for one that works in this market, its pretty obvious: Microsoft is playing as hard a game as it possibly can when it comes to Linux and Open Source. They realize they will loose terrain to it and are going to make us fight for it very, very hard.
This includes them doing a LOT of spending. Hell... i think "they" (this includes MS's senior partners personally) are even aquiring stock of some of their clients to use as microsoft posterboys. Or well, perhaps thats a little far fetched, let me rephrase: some companies partly owned by some of MS's senior partners have a strong commitment to Microsoft technology, and these companies are not small and are very vocal Microsoft advocates (that sounds a little better, doesnt it?).
So, you will hear this stories a lot as microsoft strives to make their FUD machine work. In the end, resistance will be futile as the market will not bow to microsoft just because and will necesarily, unstopably, move to the cheaper alternative which is, without a doubt, FOSS.
NO SIG
Wrangling those backend tools would require just as much training as learning another system. You need staff to manage Sharepoint effectively.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The Wiki part is awful. We have Wiki, static, CGI and Sharepoint content around here, and without exception (so far) the Sharepoint content is harder to use and less useful than any of the alternatives.
Dunno anything about the collaboration feature; I guess if you're forced to collaborate on Word docs and Excel spreadsheets for a living, you need something. -Jay-
What was the company doing that caused them to have incompatibility issues? Hell, all that had to do was request that employee's download a copy of OpenOffice at home so they don't run into these issues. Also, I hate this bull crap about "training issues". When did people become so lazy that they couldn't tinker around with a program (which is not very dissimilar to the Office Suite) to figure out how to work it? Not to mention the wealth of free documentation available for the applications. Sounds like someone high up didn't want to put the effort in to make it work...
If none of the people that you know satisfy all three of those conditions, then pick one of the consumer-oriented distributions and go for it. This is not a choice that is appropriate to agonize over because you won't know what characteristics are important for your happiness until you've tried something. From your perspective, all of the major distributions are the same, so choice is something that is burdensome rather than liberating. That's the vagueness you talk about. Beginners don't need choices that they just find bewildering. Instead, they need to latch on to an expert (often called a "mentor") who will make choices for them until they understand what those choices mean.
Is everyone talking about it really a good reason to pick an OS? It depends upon your goals. The usual compelling reason to install an OS is because the application you want to run is available only for that OS. That doesn't appear to be the case, here. So, you have to examine your motives. Why do you want to do this? It looks to me like you're trying to see what everybody is talking about. In that case, then maximum buzz factor is the best reason for picking an OS. After all, it's not like you're going to spend hundreds of dollars just trying the thing out. If you don't like it, wipe it off your hard drive and go on with your life until you know someone who satisfies all three of the conditions in the first paragraph.
davfs
or tortoiseSVN
All these government agencies that are endlessly switching in and out of MS Office. Don't they ever get sick of eating the transition costs over and over. Isn't the goal of Office Productivity Software to be productive?
...MS Office and OO.o--I am not a huge fan of either. That doesn't mean you have to settle for "feeling filthy" running MS Office, being frustrated with OO.o or using a text editor to do word processing jobs.
Frankly, what do I think is the best office suite? Office 97 or 2000. Everything after that just went downhill.
[...]
and the rest of the contenders for 'best office suite' crown are nonstarters.
Haven't you given any serious consideration to KOffice or GNOME Office applications? Your post suggests that you would like something that meets all the basic needs but is lightweight, and both are more lightweight and fairly capable and (IMHO) more usable than OO.o OR MS Office. I am not a really huge fan of KOffice apps but I DO find the GNOME ABIWord and GNUmeric applications to be very welcoming to those who yearn for Office 97/2000 type of experiences. GNUmeric in particular is a favourite of mine--it has that snappy, lightweight feel to it yet is better than Excel in that it does calculations better and has a better library of functions for REAL number crunchers.
Anyways, I tend to get a bit frustrated with most office suites because they continue to grow more monolithic (everything gets jammed together into one massive megapackage, which runs counter to "the UNIX way"). I favour the GNOME office apps because they have retained a degree of autonomy from one another that its competitors seem to want to erase.
... IMO OpenOffice is probably easier for MS Office people to learn than the new "improved" Office..
(Though a project that aims to reskin the OO interface to have the same menu placements and keyboard shortcuts, not unlike GIMPshop for gimp + photoshop, would be a pretty good idea IMO...)
>If you don't want to run it, no-ones going to make you. You get the choice, see ?
r otimeline75cr6.png
Yes, but we aren't talking about the choice between whether or not to run it, we're talking about once you've chosen to run Linux, how do you make the choice which flavor to run?
>I guess that would be why you ran Windows ?
No, like I said, I run Windows for games.
>Well, not a million. Just a handful, like Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/2000 Server/Xp Home/XP Pro
First, we aren't talking about legacy products. I'm sure in a hundred years there will be a hundred past versions of Windows. We're talking about the current offering. And for most home users there is really only ever one current Windows product being marketed. Today that is Vista home edition. Until recently, it was Windows XP home edition.
But all this is beside the point.
http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/5090/linuxdist
From the above image, there are currently over 100 different flavors of Linux to choose from. I don't know how many of these are legacy and how many are current, but there are at least 12 flavors that have been created in the last year or so. Ok, it's not a million, but it is far more than a handful, and far more difficult a choice than running down to Best Buy and picking up the latest version of Windows.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Why is it that everytime I read an article like this, I get the sinking suspicion that no one really takes Open Source seriously, and that it is being used solely as a bargaining chip to leverage better deals out of Microsoft? Here's how it usually breaks down:
1: Large corporation or government organization threatens to go completely Open Source.
2: Microsoft damage control team gets on a plane and starts making deals to retain business, even going so far as to sell licenses at a loss in some cases.
3: Large corporation or government organization laughs all the way to the bank, as they just saved millions on licensing costs.
4: Open Source feels cheap and used. Possibly in need of day-after pill.
Openoffice sucks.
Have you ever even try using that thing for anything serious?
Try plotting some stuff in the excel equivalent. The thing is so f'n slow.
The whole thing is really slow. I try to avoid it as much as I can.
(Information on the milestones)
Thanks for playing.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
a)He agrees MS Office was more expensive
b)He admits he has not actually worked out, or even made an estimate, as to how much OSS was costing them. Thus not being able to know if the switch back saved even a penny.
c)He previously held senior positions at Microsoft.
So basically you have a management that decides to switch to a more expensive solution without knowing it will save them even a penny, and the person in question also happens to have direct ties to the company which provides the more expensive solution...
You know in some places this kind of thing can get you jail time...
The FOSSies just don't get it: "Free" does not automagically mean "Better". People are ALWAYS more willing to pay for a superior product, and free actually means there is no incentive for the product to improve.
MS spends literally millions of dollars doing customer satisfaction surveys, workflow analysis, etc. FOSSies... follow Microsoft's tail lights and steal the features they can figure out how to code.
Look at Lunix, for example: it's the FOSSie flagship product, and it's still trying to catch Windows 95's distant tail lights. Lunix still can't auto-detect and auto-config hardware at install... to say nothing of hardware added post-install. For all the ridicule they have made of "plug and pray" over the years, they still haven't succeeded in being as reliable as Microsoft.
It's no wonder they have been desperately trying to get the Windows source code: it would be the only way the feckless Lunix programmers will get their third-tier OS to move past the point MS was at 1995.
>>> "Some MS sales rep had a potential sale of 500 seats, and had to sweeten the deal to get a sale."
... for free. But you still chose the £12k ($24k) car from the ItCostsYouAlotToBuyPartForThisCar dealer because he said they'd throw in a set of tyres.
Except it's like you went to buy a car and OpenCar offered you the same model but with the filler cap on the opposite side and with a slightly different colour scheme (and maybe it's top speed and torque are a few percent less)
"If one expects it to provide all services for an enterprise, it can become daunting. But what do you expect for a product that provide so many features?"
Didn't Microsoft intergrate Groove into their product line?
I wonder how much this switch had to do with them receiving files from the outside in Microsoft new proprietary Office 2007 file formats. OpenOffice simply can't open them (except for one rather limited DOCX-only converter).
My observation is this is an insanely major hurdle for OpenOffice. And even a major factor for people switching from earlier versions of MS-Office.
MS Office lovers are wife-beaters.
Q.E.D.
Why do companies feel the need to publicly announce what software they use or that they are switching software solutions? Who cares? Their customers couldn't care less. I don't know what software my local supermarket uses, and I don't care. And I hope to never see them publicly announce it either.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
About 500 seats are involved. MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
Any business that purchases MS software assurance (pretty much comes automatically when purchases from a reseller) receives all the benifits of software assurance which includes home user for employees + other great benifits. MS didnt 'conced' anything.
Sounds like eGroupware to me.
Been using it for years. Very featureful - in fact has more features than you listed for Sharepoint. Also works in any web browser so remote access is built in.
Only thing missing is version control in the FileManager component. Sounds like a good feature request that would be easy to implement with RCS.
"...but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing..."
They kept getting a div by $0 error.
You don't know if you're salary or not? How come?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
hahaha
"What can the Linux movement do to curb the switchbacks, and address some of these concerns?"
Get better representatives.
His arguments are categorically not accurate or very weak. (1) OpenOffice.org certainly provides more road-map than Microsoft does; (2) case studies are much larger deployments (such as the city of Munich, Germany) demonstrated that little to no training was necessary, and the only remain area of difficulty calculating costs for OpenOffice over MS Office is in incompatibilities--but the incompatibilities are far less than those between older versions of MS Office and MS Office 2007.
I have worked at a variety of large organizations and the decision-making for Microsoft is made repeatedly inspite of the agreement/disagreement of those who will use or support the software. The Microsoft product only has to arguably, minimally meet the requirements for which it will be deployed. I, like many, have scratched my head repeatedly over this phenomenon--and at times directly asked for the rationale behind such decisions. Imperically demonstrating the inaccuracy of presumptions can only agitate the decision-maker and get you in politically hot-water. From my experience, this is either caused by the decision-makers personal experiences and biases or else it is a result of Microsoft's strenuous efforts at wining and dining them, and sometimes offering the prospects of grant money or other free-deals. That is, a guess, good salesmanship. It is, however, very bad for the corporate departments that have to live with the consequences.
Right now, Microsoft's big strategic push is Microsoft Sharepoint. The product is far more business-talk than actual product or capabilities, but that doesn't stop executives from buying into it. The actual product is, essentially a crude, web CMS (Content Management System) with tightly integrated WebDAV. Technically, it is a slew of parts of other Microsoft applications crudely integrated into one product, and is very difficult to properly configure most of its services.
However, Microsoft Sharepoint will provide all of an organization's content/document collaboration needs and web presence in one web-based software suite. Users generally need Microsoft Office and internet explorer to work with it. This is clearly a drive to dominate the Internet and Intranet in the same way Microsoft dominates the desktop.
Matthew
MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
They used to do that as a matter of course. For the same reason they're doing it again, because it blocks the competition.
I'm from New Zealand. I'm about the only person running Linux in the whole country. New Zealanders haven't had the 'large' exposure to computers without the coloured-flag that the rest of the world has. New Zealand is a very Microsofty country in the fact that its perceived as what 'normal' computers run. Granted, the internet in NZ is the same as anywhere else but what I mean is that there has been no big push. Recently the government opted out of purchasing more MS Office licences for the Apple computers in all schools. All schools had to erase all MS Office software from every Mac they had. They now use that Mac port of OpenOffice. But thats about it. Eeeeeverything is 'I can use MS Office, gimme a job'. I agree though about what that dude said about using web standards. It should all be W3C based. Microsoft tried binaryizing the web with ActiveX and that resulted in a pile of turds. Web browsers are amazingly advanced as it is without leaving text based formats.
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
We tried switching of Open Office in our company and we've had an endless stream of problems. Don't get me wrong - OpenOffice on its own is good enough and in some things better than MS Office. However before it is 100% compatible with MSOffice, it cannot be used as a replacement. And when I say 100%, I mean it.
Some of our problems included:
- Inability to edit files created with MSOffice. The formatting would be lost, or some parts (e.g. pictures) were not editable at all.
- Exporting files was similarly problematic (alas, 100% of our partners and customers require to receive MS Office documents). Sometimes files would look different in MSOffice.
- MSOffice has better help system
- Everybody already is familiar with MSOffice.
It turned out that everybody needed to have a copy of MSOffice anyway, to check if the files converted cleanly, etc. It was all pointless.
Well, putting it like that seems that MS did a sneaky move and let people use free Office at home.
I don't know if that's the case, but some types of MS licensing allow employees to use the licensed product at home, with no extra charge. Maybe that's the case, and not a "dirty trick", like the phrase seems to imply.
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
Well it seems like the CIO is really a Microsoft Lackey... OK.Sorry. A "Neutral Businessman who needs to fully understand the TCO in relation to the company and future development "
He seems to be under the impression that because it costs a lot of money and has the Microsoft name that it can then be calculated from a Business perspective in relation to TCO.
The Open Office format has been compatible with a variety of Microsoft Excel and Word Macros from a programming perspective. I frequently use Excel spreadsheet that work perfectly in Oo. I see no reason why Open Office cant be used in an Office environment.
And I have never had any training in Microsoft Office. There are TAFE/College Short Courses for that sort of thing - why pay some over inflated CS dropout who could only get the Training job to teach someone how to use programs that everyone uses everyday? I use Outlook, Word and Excel everyday in my current job but haven't had training. Does that mean I cant use the programs or I am using them incorrectly. NO! You open a file, type and then save. ITS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!
What it seems increasingly like is that he has been given a Budget that he doesn't want to give up. He has the "Training" area of the budget that he can blow on those sorts of things and now he wants to increase his budget, and thus his level of Self-Importance. (To Quote Shrek - Seem's he's compensating for something.) If he doesn't justify spending heaps of money on every area, including Training, then he might loose his budget.
If he owned up to the real reasons for taking up MS Office then the rest of us wouldn't be so critical of him and his so-called reasons.
So the REAL reasons for changing Oo to MS Office:
- Needs to justify and Increase his budget
- Is a friend of MS and worked there before
- Cant figure out why $0 training and $0 Purchasing budget doesn't increase his budget.
I'm not trying to be flamebait or start a flame war but Business People should stop using Microsoft versus Oo as a reason to justify their own poor business decisions.
Well I'm sure you have it working great for you, but the devil's in the details. Those added cooler features do not mean much if many of the expected features still hiccup or act quirky.
One (of the many) annoying problem with OOCalc is how it handles auto-filtering. If I auto-filter on a set, then add entries at the end, when I change the selection the new entry does not get filtered. So then I have to reselect everything re-run the filter. But if one of the columns is date and I have formulas based on date, then I run into other problems. I've tried this with native file format and with .XLS, no luck. Excel 97 (over 9 yrs old) seems to get it right.
This is just one of the *many* tiny little nuisances I just cannot deal with as they make me do more work. I give OpenOffice a try every major release to see how many issues get resolved, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Right now I just have Office 2000 running in WINE. It works.
I am *no* Microsoft Office fan. I used WordPerfect till the end. Then to add insult to injury some of my old WordPerfect files still don't load correctly in OpenOffice. Well they have made *significant* improvements, to be fair, originally Abiword was the only thing that loaded them.
But back to the original point, there are many tiny quirks that make OOCalc and OO difficult (sometimes impossible) to use. I look forward to its eventual perfection.
Linux Resources
Right here.
Honestly, if this outfit can't be bothered to Google (the keywords I searched for were "openoffice" and "roadmap"), let 'em have MS Office. They deserve it.
(Also, OpenOffice is not the only alternative. I use Koffice, but YMMV.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't know what the big deal is. Isn't Office free? Or is that just for Slash'ers?
(||) Nehmo (||)
1. Someone will fix some bugs. If someone feels like it. Maybe... Someday... (Pack a lunch... the 8618 open defects in the issue list, spanning several years, takes a while to open.)
2. The next version might emulate half of the look and feel that MS office had 5 years ago. Poorly. Oh, is that memory? I'll just take that.
3. If it takes you more than 5 years to get comforatble with a product, this is the one for you. We'll never change a thing. And we'll keep up the same level of support forever! (See item #1.)
4. And a bonus... it's Open! So the other two OO users can read your documents too! For "Free"!
"If your company has a mechanic that can put the parts together, yes. Most companies think they've hired a Network Engineer (who obviously would have no issues integrating the listed components, and would laugh at you for suggesting he might). "
Wow, if integrating applications qualifies someone as a Network Engineer, most of us should be adding it to our resumes. I always thought it had something to do with being an expert in Network Protocols.
Home use rights are a standard benefit of Software Assurance for Microsoft Office. Any large Office user is eligible for Software Assurance, and would be foolish not to take it. There was no "concession" here, and nothing that hasn't been available to every SA customer for several years.
Why is this in the Linux section? What does OpenOffice have to do with Linux other than the fact it is one of many platforms this particular word-processor runs on? Ahah.. it's open-source, just like Linux, the flag-waving mascot of all things open-source.
/. categories?
Linux has been my preferred desktop and development environment for around 8 years. I really like Linux yet increasingly I find this Open-Source == Linux misleading and contrived - especially given the relative prevalence of FOSS in most areas of computing life these days.
I'm not the first to say it: perhaps time for a little spring-clean of
MS Office is the 'no brainer', don't have to put up a struggle in any way option. That is why corporations use it. The question is, how do we make OO the 'no brainer' option?
I personally think getting it into more schools is the best way to start. Make people comfortable with it, and then they will demand it in the workplace as they get older.
While it's great that OO.o is making strides in market penetration, the problem remains that even if you train everyone at your company to use it, everyone at your partner companies generally won't and the formats aren't completely compatible.
Having used Office 2007 I must say that I've been pleasantly surprised at the intuitiveness of the product, and have yet to discover a flaw, in general usage anyway.
MS may be a less than great company, but Office is a solid platform and application. When openoffice.org manages to put out a product that competes I'll use it, but until then I don't have the time to mess around with a lesser product.
In my experience, it's all a matter of how experienced (or not) your ITS administrator is. IF he/she is someone who's windows certified out their ass and windows, and windows, and windows windows windows with a "I've used linux before" experience package....then obviously Windows + MS Office is probably what will work best for that outfit. On the other hand, if your admin is someone who's a unix/linux vet of many years (especially starting to count them in decades instead of years) then you will most likely experience a near perfect Linux environment that would spank any MS-software run environment in performance and reliability. I've seen uber corporate Linux environments that run a mix of Solaris & Fedora servers, with 100% Fedora workstations, and a few windows laptops here and there. In this environment users were extremely satisfied, got everything from engineering renderings to graphic publications to regular office work done just fine. This all without any MS products involved. Apps such as Matlab, Gimp+Pixel, OpenOffice, 99% Gnome desktops, there were 2 KDE users, all using Firefox and Evolution with some sort of groupware that was being upgraded to Zimbra I think. But this is because their admin and his subordinates were competent in the area of *nix implementation. Put a Windows guy on that site and he'll be in hell. I think the success of OpenSource implementation and especially integration with MS products all has to do with how competent the Admin and ITS staff are, as well as *what* they're knowledgable in. Because just because you're a computer guy doesn't mean you can program, or setup servers and fix networks, and vice verca. And even if you were both, that doesn't mean that you can do it with both *nix and Windows equally well. And if you can do all/all/all that then i tip my redhat to you. ;-p
Really, mate, you should read what you just wrote. That is such a load of crap. I used Office 2007 for the first time today, along with another system admin. We got stuck on the fucking simple operation of how to open a document....
Microsoft asserts that OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with their products. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice.org formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice.org documents are published and publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own document formats.
I, for one am glad that NZ has decided to move back to Microsoft Office. It is one less non-contributor to the overall community and body of effort making Open Source successful for the rest of us. If they're not going to help improve OSS, then they're just in the way.
I work on Open Source in my spare time because it's fun. The more you start telling me what I should be doing with MY spare time, I'll just go find something else more fun to do instead.
I have read numerous astroturfers here on slashdot praise Office 2007 for its wonderful, brilliant, earth shattering, world peace bringing, new UI (did we tell you the UI is new, all yours for only some ungodly upgrade fee?). Somedays I really wonder about MS marketing if you clowns are the best they can do (hint: try coming up with wild praise that isn't word for word the same as MS marketing buzz).
Today, I had to test a Word template in Office 2003 and Office 2007. I had never used Office 2007 before. I started up Word 2007 and was promptly fucked: where the fuck is the File menu item? No alt key helped me, no icon, just a bunch of useless shit that some insane prick at MS decided was a good idea to shove in a UI. Ctl-O saved the day. I promptly quit Word 2007 and left. I will give MS brownie points for being "innovative" about the new UI. The brainless bastards have been yacking on about "innovation" for so goddamn long that it had to happen sometime.
But seriously, who, dear God, could claim that the user training required for moving from Office 2003 to Office 2007 would be less than moving from Office 2003 to OOo 2.0, which has a very similar UI to Office 2003?
Office 2007 along with Sharepoint might be a nice way to share documents in a company and publish them to the web at the same time, but OOo can do that a lot cheaper with any CMS capable of parsing xml
From Microsoft, because they WERE an OpenOffice.org user. I am sure Microsoft has been lobbying them as soon as it was announced that they were going to OOo. So all in all, it is a win.
;-) MS would REALLY be hurting against their stock holders.
When they have to upgrade to the next version of Office, they can make a big deal of going to OOo again, to get a better price. Now if everyone would go that route.
Based off the article it sounds like they were told EXACTLY what to say when they went back to MS Office.
I wish them luck.
Scott Carr
Hahahaha, ha!
RedHat - oops, they're a pay company now
Slackware
Gentoo
Mandrake
Unbuntu and all Unbuntu like forks
KDE
Gnome
KDE and Gnome forks
Gentoo
And don't forget *BSD
Eat me, Microsoft is not Bill Gates anymore. You all lost that whipping boy years ago. They only reason you're all pissed is that you had the chance to take huge market shares in 2000-2002. But you know what happened, the same thing that always happens with open source. You all spent 5 years bitching about the right way to do things and NOTHING GOT DONE. KDE is still KDE of five years ago, as is Gnome. Gentoo died, Loki gave up, RedHat got smart, Linus silently exited to stage left as did that silly company he went to work for, Cedega keeps promising but in the end keeps sucking and is hanging on by its fingernails, projects, distributions and goals keep forking, and you know what....
I got older, I got tired of trying to figure out what in the hell I was supposed to install to get the job done. That guy above that was giving Sharepoint crap by saying "Apache+Sendmail+Mailman+I don't freaking care." Maybe in your world you have time to figure this all out. I don't. Unfortunately, a lot of us don't live in the world of academia or research groups. We work in jobs where bosses say get this done by this date. Its not an arbitrary date, its real.
1995-2000 was an incredible time for enterprise level open source, then we started to get the corporate, "We promise, promise, promise." We promise OpenOffice will be an easy transition (hahaha), we promise that your Grandmother will have no problem switching (hahaha), we promise your employees won't complain about NEW stuff."
You know what, MS SQL Server works, Windows 2003 Server works, Sharepoint works, Exchange works, Symantec Corporate Virus Scanner works, the Windows based program that controls my buildings security system works (8 years straight without a problem), Windows XP (eat me bashers) works. I have an employee overnight me an XP based laptop that needs to be rebuilt...I get it at 10:30am and am done and sending it back out the door at 3:00pm.
To quote myself, most of open sources problem was with Bill Gates, not Microsoft.
You want Open Source to succeed, do it better.
I work in a technical environment with experienced individuals from other industries. Tech staff are still discovering frozen panes in Excel, page numbering in Word, change tracking, etc. for the first time.
Regardless of intelligence, when people learn how to use a tool in an adhoc manner (or even if they have training) they will fall into a habitual usage pattern, their comfort zone. They may not even be aware of features to solve problems they use inefficient methods for (page numbering, etc.) and will not even consider looking in the help documentation since they don't expect the feature, or don't know what it's called.
Tools like Office, Photoshop, and the like will always be like this. And switching the tool on people (even if it's functionally equivalent) takes the user out of the comfort zone and as their productivity suffers, they lament the change.
It would be helpful if those classes in HS/College that teach you "Business Skills" or "Typing" didn't just teach a software application, but actually taught you about the tools and approaches in general so that the end-user had a good feel for what tasks can be automated/assisted by commonly available software.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
For the life of me, I don't understand why people still keep using Office Suites for COLLABORATION. Every company on the planet should outright BAN Microsoft Access. Our MS Access issue has spiraled out of control to a point where we have THOUSANDS of little databases all over the place...
MS Word is fine for typing up letters, but documentation is better kept in a wiki somewhere, or a web based CMS, where versions can be tracked, the documentation can be indexed, and it can be searched.
Office is a crutch that people should be moving away from.
"So, in other words, you've never worked inside a modern corporate office."
Have you??
I have worked in multiple corporations, a school district, and a government agency.
None of them train their staff in an effective way. The users are on their own.
Some will pay lip service, and pretend to train staff, but less than 5% are allowed to actually go to training.
All of the business took 2-3 years to upgrade to a current version of MS Office, causing many problems with file compatibilites, since Microsoft changes the file format of every version of Office.
As far as capabilities, some people will use MS Office well, but it's a small percentage. Most people in the places I have worked over the last 20 years, barely know how to use MS Office, and it's a huge waste of time and money for simple documents.
So when you state that users use the office suite to do complex things, just how many people is that? In my experience, it has never been higher than 5% of all staff who have MS Office.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Sharepoint is free with Windows :)
If you want to go for a full blown portal, then yea it costs, but for document management and such... Sharepoint is free.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Windows NT 5+ w/at least IE6.0 can browse WebDAV resources ... they call them Web Folders or something like that. The interface is similar to browsing FTP resources (you can drag-n-drop, and when you doubleclick stuff it downloads to a temp directory and then runs the shell action selected in the menu)
And I'm pretty sure if you have XP or 2003 or Vista the standard file dialog supports it too.
Supporting evidence: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321932/en-us
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
What about hiring people that have experience in Open Office and/or Linux? How about starting the company with only Linux and Open Office? I believe it's possible. Some may disagree. Who cares, I know the truth.
Killed a lot of the cool infrastructure, although kept the change tracking/multiediting features and put then into 2007 for SharePoint integration. I'm not really sure why... at the very least they didn't keep the pluggable-presence protocol (useful for stuff other than Office) and offline change sync, which I think were killer features.
Probably NIH. Or maybe it was too powerful to include in the base products? I don't know.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I tried to use open Office 2.2 writer and calc at work as an office/excel replacement:
- Open Office broke hyperlinks in a design document. (Had to revert it and redo the edits in real MS office.)
- Open Office also didn't format and print correctly, making the boundaries of tables invisible in output. (So I couldn't even use it to just READ the document.)
- Calc seems to recalculate the entire spreadsheet when any change is made to any cell, rather than computing dependencies. This makes any edit on the document I was working on glacial - half a minute or more for EVERY change to render before it responded to keystrokes again.
- Calc also lost a bunch of labeling for graphs. (Gone from the spreadsheet for several updates before I figured out that it had happened.)
I would much prefer to use FOSS (and encourage the company to get away from spear-phishing targets). Instead I end up using true Microsoft office tools on a Windows server over the LAN via rdesktop. B-(
Get it fixed, guys.
(And I'm sorry, but I have too much work to do at the "day job" - long into the night - to fix it myself.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Exchange-sharepoint-outlook. Ok sitting ducks.
Open Office suit is not the suit to take them out. Koffice is the one for them.
Just wait Oct is going to really see fun in this point of view.
Please note Koffice comes with 2 great image editing tools. Those alone can be worth while installing it.
For the last 7 years, MS has had a HIGH turnover in their execs. They all appear to be starting Linux companies or going to Google.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I would just like to point out that *anyone* who purchases Microsoft Office with Open License (what most large companies do), that they automatically get free copies for home.
Microsoft did not "throw it in" to sweeten the deal for this customer. It's been part of the package for years now.
-David
The car industry has never been an instance of morality or good management.
Aguments don't count in this industry, that's why they still refuse to build more fuel-efficient cars, despite lower manufacturing costs and a relatively high demand.
I don't believe that things and people can be truely evil, but the car industry is about the closest thing to beeing evil.
It just seems to harm the society with everything it does. Switching to properitary software is just one instance of it.
It's not really that MSO is better, but that all their workers have a lot more experience on it. Nobody likes learning a new program when their old one works just fine, imagine having to enforce 500 of your staff to learn OO. But the real thing is that people simply get so used to one thing that they are just pretty much forever biased towards it. This is why people always go "oh anime is so much better in the original Japanese" or whatever. You aren't going to convince 500 people that OO is better or even the same when they have so much built up experience on MSO. Frankly, it's totally understandable, I have a graduate degree in CS and I myself drag my feet in learning new IDEs or whatnot. There is no way I would even spend any time learning OO, I know MSO enough to get what I want, I simply do not want to spend time and effort learning OO regardless of how easy it is. It's interesting too if you think about it. The RIAA and MPAA spend a ton of money hunting down piracy in colleges. MS spends... almost nothing. In fact their copy protections on MSO is frankly weak compared to say Vista or XP. Have you heard of students being hunted down for having pirated MSO? We all know it's totally rampant. They also give out a lot of free crap (if you attend their boring meetings in the CS dept, you can usually walk out with free software) and of course have the edu discounts. Fact is, I'm willing to bed MSO turns a big blind eye unofficially because they know that future workers will be so used to and engrained on MSO that businesses will have to use MSO, and THAT's who MS is very tough on in terms of piracy. Also, it's not just the current workers that have to be retrained, but imagine every new employee being asked "have you used OO before?" "What's OO? Is that like Office?" Lots of you guys are probably IT or at least geeks and hence have a boner for all things open source, but be honest, if you were a company in some totally not-related-to-tech-field that had a budget for software (tax deductible after all!) but not for having your employees miss irreplacable deadlines cuz they deep down hate their office tool or have to be trained or retrained or whatever, you too would probably stick MSO. Also, using OO as leverage against MS was smart too haha. Note - not saying MSO is better. But college students who ARE NOT TECH GEEKS LIKE MOST OF YOU will have ZERO experience with it and Linux. If OO wants to "win" it needs to become more of a factor on college campuses, especially among depts that will produce the future office workers. This generally means NOT the CS dept!! The only open office I saw at my old campus was ALL in the engineering department! The other departments (liberal arts, social sciences, etc) ALL HAD MSO! Do you think that people go into CS to work in office admin or other heavy MSO positions? Of course not. So OO is being targeted to the wrong people. Most of you guys are the wrong people. That's probably why you are all pro-OO.
In any case I'd refrain from extrapolating the gender specific anecdotes to your user populations.
Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard
It's not Microsoft's fault you are incompetent, and purposely use junky hardware, and Comcast hires people even less competent than yourself.
If OpenOffice isn't completely compatible with every version of MS Word/Excel, ever corrupts a file, or fails to render the formatting exactly as it was on another platform, then this is proof positive that OpenOffice isn't ready for serious users. It's great for fanboys or those who just hate Microsoft, but for normal people who need to "get work done," it isn't up to the task.
You have to use different logic to ensure that you justify the decision you have already made on other grounds. I thought everyone knew that.
I don't use OpenOffice because it's free. I have several similarly priced versions of MS Office I purchased at the Kazaa store. I use OpenOffice because of the PDF Export feature, the fact that it's available on Linux, and it serves my needs. It continues to serve my needs even if businesses decide not to use it. And even if it doesn't, I have Abiword and LaTeX. It isn't that I dislike MS Office, but that I dislike painting myself into a corner by depending on that one software package. I'm no visionary hippie, but I don't like spending time and money to gradually eliminate my own options.
Got milk?
1) Companies attempt to investigate/convert to FOSS and Linux.
2) The "community" does zero to assist with transition or education, instead preferring to focus on childishly deriding them as "evil" if they step so much as an inch out of line with Stallmanite philosophy.
3) Said companies do not have sufficient knowledge about Linux to be able to complete the changeover (which is often a large scale process) on their own. They don't know which hardware Linux will or won't work with, and so they try and get it to work with hardware that it might be fine with on Windows, only to find it failing. Tech support becomes an unspeakable nightmare, and the people on the helpdesk usually don't have any more idea of how to solve their users' problems than the users themselves. Also, which distribution do companies use? Ubuntu? Red Hat? Debian? Slackware?
4) Meanwhile, Microsoft are standing in the background, asking said companies why they're bothering to put themselves through this much pain and suffering in the first place. The "community" continues to distance itself from said companies, supporting Microsoft's portrayal of them as nothing more than a gang of fanatical, anarcho-communist malcontents who simply demand that everyone get with the new religion without lifting a finger to actually make it happen on a practical basis.
5) Microsoft offers said companies whatever concessions they wanted which prompted said companies to try and switch to Linux in the first place, and said companies finally, after much failed effort, revert back to Microsoft.
6) The "community" stand around alternating between the usual chorus about said companies being "evil," on the one hand, and wondering why companies are unable to escape the lure of Microsoft on the other.
hehe... i guess my critical analysis of linux and windows isn't totally wrong atleast... http://agarwal-rohit.blogspot.com/2007/02/linux-or -windows-part-i-why-linux.html
http://agarwal-rohit.blogspot.com/2007/02/linux-or -windows-part-ii-why-windows.html
I always try to buy a Laptop that uses components that are supported by Linux, you can't buy a incompatible Laptop and then complain that Linux isn't working, that's like trying to get Vista to work with that ISA ethernet card. I actually went the other way around, I thought Windows would be enough for me but after 4 months I switch to Linux, haven't had much problem since.
The thing is if something sucks on Windows/MacOS you can't use it, but if it sucks on Linux you can work around it. So even though Linux support for Bluetooth was neither better nor worse, it allowed me to do an easy shell script to get it working.
We went the same thing at our company. We had offices in Europe and the USA. The CIO rammed OO down everyone's throat and said it was the way of the future. I will say that the European community handled it better than the USA community though, but that may be more on the culture than user ability.
Everyone responding here, I think, can be assumed to have some computer knowledge. You all can figure out that commands like Save, Copy, Paste work the same from program to program. My experience with the user base is not as good. I have people that can't even plug in their mouse. There are people that still use "password" their password because they can't remember anything else. Unfortunately we need these people, i.e. the Sales and Finance Departments.
When we switched to OO, the big problem was familiarity. We took away the one tool they could use. Widespread panic ensued. Users cried. Users whined. The last straw was when the owner of the company couldn't save a document because "the buttons look too different".
So it's not functionality you are fighting, it's familiarity. It is perception. I will admit that we had a huge problem trying to convert Excel macros to OO. The biggest factor in the decision to switch back was based more on emotion than on technical compatibility.
If you worked in an office where everyone could set up their own computer, install their own software and maintain it, these kind of switches are easy. If you work in an office like me, where people can't even burn their own CDs and copy/paste their own pictures, conversions like this do not go well. EVER!!
Fast, cheap, correct. You get to pick two.
2) The "community" does zero to assist with transition or education, instead preferring to focus on childishly deriding them as "evil" if they step so much as an inch out of line with Stallmanite philosophy.
How is the community supposed to know when somebody is switching? Is there some device that sets off an alarm when somebody switches to, or from, F/OSS software? If the company needs help from the community, all the company has to do is ask. Besides, who's calling the company "evil?"
3) Said companies do not have sufficient knowledge about Linux to be able to complete the changeover.
First this isn't about "Linux." Secondly, shouldn't the company, in one way or another, get that knowledge? Is it the community's responsibility to educate everybody - in advance - about every possible detail regarding hardware compatibility etc? How is the community supposed to know what the company is doing, or what the company needs, if the company does not ask?
4) Meanwhile, Microsoft are standing in the background, asking said companies why they're bothering to put themselves through this much pain and suffering in the first place. The "community" continues to distance itself from said companies, supporting Microsoft's portrayal of them as nothing more than a gang of fanatical, anarcho-communist malcontents who simply demand that everyone get with the new religion without lifting a finger to actually make it happen on a practical basis.
WTF? Look, if you decide to use a certain OS, or certain software app - whether F/OSS of proprietary - it's up to you to figure out if it will work for you, and how you will implement it, and it's up to you to learn how to use it. There is tons of documentation out there. The community is there to help if you ask. The F/OSS community can not magically sense what you need to know. And how does the F/OSS community "distance" themselves?
CIO (n.) Chief Information Officer. The person in a company or organization in charge of receiving bribes in return for making ludicrious claims in IT media.
Seriously. You can say that OpenOffice word processor is pretty close, but the OpenOffice spreadsheet is just terrible compared to Excel. You get what you pay for, and if you want the best, then pay for Office.
This is my sig.
It always amazes me that "training" is actually a cost concern with regards to office products. Is it really that hard to use OpenOffice if you already know how to use MS Office?
"Uhh Ohhh, the font size isn't in the same place!!! Uhh what do I do!!! I can't do anything unless an animated paperclip tells me. I'll call IT"
Uh, yeah.
.edu s to take a look - massive hidden costs even with deep discounts it killed other, worthier projects. Vendor lock-in. Your data is not yours. And it's a fucking web server.
Sharepoint for a heavily subsidized judas goat project to get other
Symantec Corp Virus Scanner works - at what? Detecting that it is doing nothing to protect the indefensible? To say a product like a virus scanner "works" you imply it provides significant defense. The virus writers have won. None of the vendors can keep up with the deluge. None of them even try to keep up with the new breed (only 5-10 years old by now) of web-based, client-side attacks. There are so many zero-days out that they are now a commodity around which a market has formed.
I don't care to eat you - XP sucks. Its license sucks. Its anti-user misfeatures suck. Vista is a nightmare in that regard. Eat yourself, fanboi. The amount of time I've lost to the suckware under the pretty windows gui could have gone to support something worthwhile with a morally defensible license.
If Windows and MS products are such hot shit, why does MS admit that they aren't fit for any purpose whatsoever? Oh, Linux has the same provision in its license? Gee, I'll go demand my money back. Got it.
... the bribe worked. Er, um, I mean... Hey! That's a pretty good PR return on an investment that couldn't have been more than about $200K.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
He speaks the truth on slashdot.
Concisely and well-reasoned.
Bury him.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle