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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
"'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
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.
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!
Exactly. We did the same, and had a rather large project in the works to switch all users to OO. Pilots showed that users trouble with the small differences was enough to stop it. Support calls were too much. That, and it ran slower. In the end, the project was beached and we stayed with MS. Sad, but true....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
They gave the company another 500 seats for free
Though I wonder just what this company is thinking if their idea of "maintaining" a website involves only Office and Word.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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 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.
It's a pretty large "collaboration" suite which allows sharing of documents, version control over documents, and things like forums, wikis, and (semi-almost) blogs for departments. It also allows custom development of web page components (think iGoogle, but more dorky. Way more dorky.)
While there may not be any one product in open sourc e that does everything SharePoint does in one package, one could definitely do it with multiple products.
Also, SharePoint - like most MS products - is a total buyin to the Microsoft mindset. If you try to do anything that is drastically "out of the box", you're going to get burned. There's very little developer documentation worth anything, and MS support is flaky.
Go figure.
Because it's not a question of which one is better.
If you have MS Office documents that can't be read by OO, then what good is OO to you ? So, yes, for some people "Open Office isn't as good because it doesn't do [something] the way MS Office does it" is a serious issue. OO might be better, just not for you.
So, better/worse is a relative term depending on your needs. Is a Ferrari better then a truck ? Not if you live in a farm.
What OO has to do is to learn from these cases and make a better product. I live in Brasil and think the brazilian government should throw a couple dozen developers in OO to fix the most serious bugs, then standardize the document format to ODF and the Office suite to OO. Heck, the government should have it's own Linux distro, train all the support teams on it and deploy it to thousands of workstations, saving literally billions in licence fees.
If you're referring to Impress, then you're wrong
1. Select the object to give a motion path to
2. Choose Slide Show - Custom Animation, click Add
3. Go to the "Motion Paths" tab
13. Any legal action is absolutly excluded. (Pi World Ranking List rules)
I handle Microsoft licensing for my company. Microsoft is desperate to keep getting their Software Assurance income. I suspect this company is paying for software assurance which gives 1 home license for each end user up to the amount of the corporate licenses. Basically each user pays for just the media and shipping which comes to about $25 for the full office suite. This is nothing unusual. You also get free Tech Net subscriptions and free training vouchers for MS training. So this in nothing special for the company in the article.
It's a work flow / collaboration tool. Think of it as a Wiki on steroids that is fully integrated with Office. It can act as a document repository. It can drive a workflow. The product is new and it is a PITA to get setup and running (which is pretty much the case with any new MS product). I've personally seen it implimented at an architectural firm. They have a lot of requirements when it comes to submitting bids. They need a lot of documentation to go with the bid. Sharepoint provides a convenient place for them to organize all of the information in one place. It sends out notifications to team members as the project progresses. Everyone who needs to be aware of their responsibilities is aware of them. Nobody can say, "I didn't know that I need to do ...." because it's all right there in SharePoint.
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
The product is new and it is a PITA to get setup and running (which is pretty much the case with any new MS product).
Sharepoint is not a new product. From what I can tell there are a few different versions and it can be somewhat confusing to differentiate between them. But the basic ones are Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) 2.0 and 3.0. These are both free and can be installed (and upgraded to 3.0) as an optional component of Windows Server 2003. There is also Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003, which I believe has been replaced by Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
Once you get past all the different versions, installing sharepoint is very easy. I installed WSS 2.0, upgraded to 3.0, and installed MOSS 2007 on top of that. Once you have it installed, you can connect to the administrative site and create sites/workspaces. It is very customizable, but if you are just using it for basic features (which in my case involves asset tracking, tasks, calendars, document management, etc) it isn't that difficult. If by "get setup and running", you mean actually getting a webpage up and running, then it is not hard at all.
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?
If you use Gnome, however, any Gnome program will access WebDAV for you without having to do anything particular, because of libgnome-vfs. Just browse to dav://somewhere.net/ in Nautilus (or davs:// for HTTPS). If your DAV server supports Content-Type properly, it'll open everything in the right program (if it doesn't support Content-Type, it may or may not open in the right program, but it doesn't necessarily get it wrong). I'd be surprised if KDE doesn't have something very much like it, but I don't know.
Btw., OSX has built in support for WebDAV without having to install anything. Just choose "connect to server" in Finder's menu and type in any DAV-compliant HTTP URL.
DAV client support in Windows sucks, though. I don't know -- surely Windows has to have some kind of VFS layer, so how comes Microsoft doesn't implement DAV using it instead of their current half-assed solution?
OpenOffice has DAV support for any platform, though.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to when I said that it sucks. Both Linux and OSX does the same thing in the filesystem layer, so applications really don't have to care at all if a file is on WebDAV or not, and they don't need to be invoked via DAV client like explorer.