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OpenOffice.org 3.0 Wants to Compete with Outlook
jason writes "At the OpenOffice.org 2007 conference about a month ago there was a presentation on what to expect in the next major milestone for their Microsoft Office competitor. "The presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an 'Outlook replacement.' This is all assuming that Thunderbird recently losing two of its main developers doesn't affect the decision, because I'm sure OpenOffice wants to ensure that Thunderbird will continue to progress before including it." This probably won't sway large corporations away from using Microsoft Office, but it could make it more intriguing for the smaller businesses that are looking to cut some costs."
Jesus. How about they compete with Word first, eh? Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.
The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.
There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good. Bundling a mail client with the rest of your apps doesn't suddenly make you competitive, especially when your whole user base could have already installed that mail client if they wanted it.
There are OSS projects that are actually making a push toward doing the things that Outlook does (like Kontact). But Thunderbird is still lagging behind Evolution imho, and neither of them play all that great with any of the groupware servers out there, open or closed.
I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it. I keep thinking, maybe they'll get their crap together, but then they do stuff like this.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Changing the names of the various apps in OOo would have a bigger effect. The number of times I've had someone think that Calc was windows calculator replacement, rather than a spreadsheet is far too high.
When it can sync with exchange servers without having to use webdav I think it will be a contender, until then I don't think so. Still, nice to have it included in the office package I guess, but does it really make a difference?
As many people have already noticed, people don't choose to use Outlook. Somebody else choose to use Exchange, and that means you're using Outlook. There's no way a third party could attempt to compete, since Exchange uses totally proprietary hooks and methods.
Personally, I think it'd be better to focus on something like a Visio replacement. Use Dia as a starting point, etc.
RFC2119
...bundling Thunderbird is a good idea in the sense that they won't try to fit more stuff in the saturated market of email clients. On the other hand, should email client and schedule integration be a priority? From my point of view, Microsoft is using Office as a tool to turn Windows itself into an all-purpose environment. Sun's efforts will probably be restricted to improve OpenOffice, and OpenOffice alone. They might risk turning it into a bloaty 300 Mb mess that people will ditch in favor of KOffice, Evolution or Office 2007 in the case of Windows users.
Apparently the OpenOffice team is not listening to what users want. Most of us don't want a "bundled" Email client to add to the bloat.... we already choose the Email client we want to use. I don't want an IM client, web browser, or music player bundled into it either!!!
This is what they should be concentrating on:
1) Faster. Fast loading, faster opening documents, faster saving documents, faster menu response.
2) Smaller. Higher efficiency. Smaller downloads.
3) More stable. Better code. Less crashing.
4) More compatible. With more types of files (for example, docx, wp, svg)
5) Better documented. End user docs, help, and developer docs.
Please this is so wrong, who needs yet another mail client?
How about first finish cleaning up the OOo code?
Then make Impress make slides look nice! Graphics output is so ugly I have to be ashamed when I use Impress, drawings in Powerpoint look so much nicer. Why cant they make good anti-aliasing of curves? What is really stupid is that when I export my slides as pdf they look really nice! Oh boy... but no, first they want to add a mail software into an already really slow office suite, THANK YOU!
And group scheduling, public folders, notes, etc ?
If not its replacing Outlook express, not outlook. And there are tons of decent competitors at that level now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Without any kind of SEAMLESS intergeneration with ACTIVE SYNC you stand ZERO CHANCE of prying Outlook from my hands. Sure I use Open Office but dumped Thunderbird after giving it more than a fair chance.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Lightning works, but just barely (I say this as someone who uses it every day). It doesn't integrate with Thunderbird well enough (e.g., dealing with invites by email). It has a kludgy screen layout in TB. Its reminders don't fire reliably. Contacts are not well integrated with events, and the recurrence system has some problems. It needs a lot of fit and finish work. I say this as someone who LIKES it, and used to use Outlook. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't prepared to fiddle with extensions, risk losing data, etc. TB+Lightning is also definitely not an Outlook replacement, since it lacks many basic features such as mail and calendar archiving, journaling, complex task management, more than basic contact management, etc.
Here's hoping that OOo will help support TB and Lightning (with the Mozilla reorganization, the calendar side is up in the air), and bring the two closer together. Without stronger calendar support, there's no way to displace Outlook.
.sig withheld by request
If you think Outlook is used mostly for email, you're mistaken. The whole point here is that Outlook is NOT just a mail-client. The whole synchronized agenda thing is a central pillar and maybe more things that I don't know are in there. Managers and administrations are intertwined with all the features Outlook has, so please, stop the FUD that's only an emailclient.
I think that the problem with Open Office is that Microsoft Office has no real competition, hence it can afford to ignore everybody else.
The problem is very simple, when it comes to using Operating Systems there is very effective competition to Windows, namely Unix, Linux (and its many variations), BSD and MAC OS. While many of these systems are low cost to own, they do provide Microsoft with an incentive to provide a better operating system.
However, Microsoft Office has no real competition. Some people will say "but what about Open Office", but the problem is that while it may be free, there is no incentive for anybody to develop program other than for the simple joy of it. Unfortunately developing a office tool today is not like developing an operating system, as you have to offer dictionaries, grammar tools, paper formatting and tool integration to support every country in every region of the world; something you either buy or pay for a lot of work to be done. The problem is that the commercial alternatives to Microsoft Office have all but died out (Word Perfect etc..), hence the market share for Microsoft Office is probably greater than that of Windows.
The solution is that somebody needs to take Microsoft on where it hurts, i.e. offer a proper Office suite that costs less than Office. Unfortunately the only company that is any position to do this is Apple, but having been hurt by Microsoft when Explorer was withdrawn for Mac OS after Apple launched Safari, I doubt whether they would even attempt to tackle this problem as Mac without Office would be a problem for interoperability with documents in the future. There is of course Star Office, but that is just a commercial version of Open Office.
So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.
For your information, I do use Thunderbird as my home email client along with Open Office on my Home PC. But believe me, if I was running a small business, I would have no option but to pay the "Microsoft tax", even if I was not using Windows.
I personally think that the only reason that Microsoft does not sell Office as part of the operating system (which for many people it could be described as, especially when it comes to Outlook) is that not only do they make most of their money from Office, but if they did they would suddenly find being themselves being prosecuted for anti-trust by the EU and US.
- A copy of Office Pro costs less than your hourly billing rate, and you have no interest in this debate, so why are you posting?
- You should not be using Excel at all. You should be using a proper financial modelling system connected to a relational database, e.g. Business Objects with various add ons. Again, for the level of investing that this necessitates, the cost is unimportant to you.
- Either you employ somebody else to do this stuff anyway, or you have to adhere to corporate policies, and so your desktop is locked down by IT and you don't have a choice of tools.
Alternatively of course you are just someone playing at investing. In which case your opinion is not particularly valuable. Given how expensive professionals have been getting it so wrong lately, anyone who trusts the financial models of an amateur without access to proper business modelling tools and data...deserves to buy a share in this wonderful toll bridge I just bought that links England and Wales.Pining for the fjords
These arguments about Microsoft Office, Outlook, OpenOffice, etc. sound ridiculously outdated. Come on, do you really think people will want to install, maintain, or run any of that bloated, complicated crap in the future?
OpenOffice is a good stop-gap replacement for people wed to old paradigms, and I'm glad its' there, but people: get over it.
What I cannot understand: how exactly does anyone expect Thunderbird to compete with Outlook as a contact manager? Sure, I use it for e-mail, and I can see how calendaring and task management could be integrated nicely, but no one seems to be addressing Thunderbird's address book, which has zero usefulness outside of e-mail. Does anyone do anything useful with the Thunderbird address book?
TANSTAAFL
Whenever you're working with non-native closed format export functionality, there *will* be incompatibilities. That's a fact of life that can't be changed. The fact that you've discovered a specific case (an image in a floating frame) where the export functionality is janky isn't a major issue, it's not even surprising.
When doing something one way is way harder than it seems like it should be you need to stop and try to see if there's a better way to do it. Maybe you don't really need the frame? Spacing around inserted elements is one of the basic things you can always do in OO.o, and you can even caption the image without inserting a frame around it.
If you can't recommend OO.o for a pilot project until it provides perfect export functionality for whatever weird combination of native layout elements you might cook up then you'll *never* be able to recommend it. I suggest the following instead: Do a pilot project of OO.o and ODF. That'll work perfectly.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
OO does have weaknesses, that's true. But when we're dishonest about how significant those weaknesses are, and about which things are weaknesses versus simply being different from one specific other office suite then we risk wasting time on trivia and getting drawn into the unwinnable game of being an imperfect copy rather than a high quality piece of software.
And some bug reports are stupid and need to be marked "Invalid".
You mean like Lotus Notes? Yea, if it's not from Microsoft than no-one in the world could possibly use it.
Sorry, just because your workplace is stuck with a Microsoft Office centric workflow and an Exchange-centric communication infrastructure doesn't mean that everyone else in the world is doomed to that horrible fate too.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.