IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o

eldavojohn writes "It's frequent that we hear of a country or city or company switching from Windows to Linux, but it's rare that we hear of one third of a million employees being told to use Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) over MS Office, and also to use the Open Document Format when saving files. The change has been mandated to take place in the next 10 days. Of course, they are doing this to illustrate that they actually offer a full-fledged alternative to Microsoft. With i4i stirring stuff up against MS Office and absolving OO.o from litigation, are we on the verge of a potential break from Microsoft's dominant document suite? Hopefully IBM supports OO.o past Sun's acquisition by Oracle instead of concentrating on Lotus Symphony."

Comments

Re:About fucking time!

[DavidR1991]

If a 10-day change is "slow as molasses" then I'd like to see what happens when they react quickly to something!

Implications

[under_score]

This goes far beyond IBM's employees. Many other large organizations are strongly influenced by IBM still. In my work as a process improvement consultant, I have seen many people using the Lotus environment, particularly in financial institutions. Does this mean that they too will start using ODF?

As well, as a Mac user myself, and for others using non-MS systems, it will be nice to be able to tell people that IBM uses OpenOffice.org (which will be the shortcut way of telling them that they are using an in-house customized version...) as an incentive / emotional proof that OOo is viable for their own use.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[slim]

Guess what... most folks still used Office instead.

Not in my department. How on earth did "most folks" get an Office license from the IBM beancounters?

There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

It rather annoys and even pisses me off that so many important business tools are written with dependencies on MS Office. That is, of course, Microsoft's intention and the primary reason for the existence of a programming language built into the office suite.

I once worked for a firm where a contract writing program that requires MS Office and, if I recall correctly, Adobe Acrobat Professional. What a huge waste of money!? Not only was this "application" quite expensive, but so are the dependencies involved... and on top of that, the application was only valid for a year. Upon learning about this situation, I had two thoughts. One was related to the old saying about a fool and his money, and the other was that my hopes of saving the company any money by going to OO.o was a lot more challenging.

Using more F/OSS in business requires that people are mindful of the applications and the dependencies [lock-in] that they bring. Moving away from commercial and proprietary isn't as simple as replacing one app with another. There are often deeper considerations.

The danger of lock-in isn't usually apparent or obvious to people who buy apps. Quite often IT isn't even involved in that decision.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Rockoon]

That is, of course, Microsoft's intention and the primary reason for the existence of a programming language built into the office suite.

If your contention is that VBA isnt useful, then explain the billions of lines of VBA code in the world. Integration with the suite is just one of the things that makes the alternatives like Open Office non-competitive. Your idea that VBA is just there as a lock-in is silly.

To translate your argument to reality: "Features that customers use extensively, when the competition doesnt have them, is only a lock-in"

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

My contention is that the reality of the presence of VBA is not necessary for an office suite. It never has been and never will be. Various external APIs say so.

I don't say it isn't useful -- don't be so defensive. But it is a problem in that VBA applications are a great deal more costly because they are not stand-alone and as a result, the user has to buy other things in order to use the application they want to use.

Customers do not often use VBA. Customers use applications that use VBA.

VBA is actually a dangerous thing as it takes an ordinarily trustworthy document and transforms it into a potential carrier for malware infection. It has been done before and continues to be done. There are certain things that shouldn't be done and including a programming language as low and as powerful as VBA gives even entry-level script-kiddies the ability to cause major problems. VBA is bad just as Active-X is bad.

The reasons that other office suites do not provide similar functionality isn't because they "can't." It's because they know they shouldn't. People who care about security and the like concern themselves with the limitations they can provide in order to protect the users. VBA (and Active-X) grant user level access to the machine and quite often require administrator level access which users have been shown more than willing to grant. (This is irrelevant since there are known exploits that cannot be patched in Win32 without breaking every application ever written that enables privilege escalation)

The purpose of VBA is to take an office applications suite and convert it into an operating platform.

If it is somehow appropriate for documents to carry executable code, then why not pictures, sounds and video? Should email carry executable code? Is it appropriate for web pages to carry executable code that isn't sandboxed and limited? From where I sit, for the same reasons all the other common file types shouldn't contain executable code, office documents shouldn't.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

Most people who use Windows use XP. Bad argument and you probably already know that. You probably also knew about the message queue vulnerability... didn't you? A professional would know. And I wouldn't be too sure that 32 bit Vista or 7 could effectively patch the problem without changing the Win32 message queue and breaking compatibility. Do you have any references to cite this achievement? Preferably one that explains why it isn't fixed in WindowsXP.

I've read through your comment history a bit. You might as well add a signature that says "I'm a Microsoft shill."

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Rockoon]

But it is worse when its worse, in spite of it being free.

Re:In my dreams

[melikamp]

[...] far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats [...] sound, still images, vector graphics, even video [...]

Text is far more complicated than any of these, with vector graphics being the most complicated left, IMHO. Sound, raster graphics, and video are just arrays with a fixed data type. There are other data fields, of course, but they are vastly less important. A rich text document, on the other hand, may have to deal with concepts like page layout, paragraph options, text options, text positioning, hierarchical styling, embedded objects, and everyone's favorite embedded scripts. That's why all off their files look like two or more markup languages are colliding in a spectacular explosion. That is if you are lucky and they are not, on top of all that, compressed binaries.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

Nope, it's worse when it has fewer features, fewer developments, and fewer compatibilities. It's worse when it doesn't have in-roads into the given user's industry practices too.

All I'm saying is that OOo is late-to-the-game, and simply isn't quite as advanced yet. They've got a long way to go, and others have had a substantive head-start.

Now why would I support a lesser product? Why would I support a late-comer? Why would I risk my hard-earned business on a product that simply isn't as mature yet?

There's one reason -- it saves me money. That becomes a value proposition. Value propositions are straight-forward business decisions. Those are easy.

Re:In my dreams

[im_thatoneguy]

Are you kidding? Still images are ridiculously easy to standardize the encoding of. And even then once you get slightly more complicated such as PSD the standard and the implementation becomes more and more difficult.

On the video front you have 'standards' such as OMF or AAF that rarely actually work perfectly.

In 3D we have Collada and FBX. Neither of which adequately describe a full 3D scene completely yet.

A text document is a very complicated file with the potential for an enormous amount of bizzare formatting and embedded data. None of the XML based standards are simple or small. They're just varying levels of complex. I would say a document standard is representing far more complex data than video but less complex than 3D scenes.

Re:In my dreams

[Schlemphfer]

>>and has a simple easy to use interface.

>Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.

I've published two books in LaTeX and will sing its praises for hours, but it cannot sanely be called simple or easy to use.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Greyfox]

You don't know who you're dealing with here. These people have been forced to use Lotus Notes for E-Mail for years. The ones that are left are largely immune to frustration.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[wvmarle]

What do we care?

They may use OO.o, their own version branded Symphony, or what-ever.

The real point here is what EVERYBODY misses and that is that they are mandating saving in Open Document Format. That's what's important. They are a major company and they are now supporting an open format, which has by now maybe a dozen word processors supporting it.

For what I am concerned they continue using MS Word in half of their business, and save the documents in ODF. Then people who have some special needs can take their special-needs-word processor and have no problems with compatibility. Linux/Mac users are also happy. Maybe there are Solaris users around even - they will be happy not having to boot Windows just to read an e-mail attachment.

Remember folks, it's the use of open standards that counts. Not the actual implementation - as long as that implementation is correct and follows the standard well, I'm happy. MS Word's lock-in with its doc format is the problem, not MS Word as such.