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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."
Previously, the used MS Office but actually recommended their customers to use Symphony. That's just a laughable position.
I'm glad the finally changed this, but i'm not sure if this actually means anything. IBM's slow as molasses in regards to everything. Want a server from them? Better wait 4-6 weeks.
Those parts of my career that were in support of software, either as a help desk or as network admin with additional duties, required a large amount of support for every program we used. In corporate environments to small business the use of Office required significant support efforts by everyone. Claims that OOo requires more support than others is specious. One can make a heavy bet and know that you'd win in judging that those people making that claim have no experience supporting others on either platform or have never used Open Office. I've watched many firms take OOo, and though there was a learning curve, use it to good advantage.
Because you don't like OOo doesn't mean it doesn't work and do the job it is supposed to do. I use it. Millions of others use it. The few people here disrespecting it (without showing proof they actually know anything about it) demonstrates the specious nature of anything they might write about it or any competing product.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Disclaimer: I used to work for IBM. Having used MS Office, several OpenOffice.org variants, WordPerfect X* and IBM Lotus Symphony, all in various versions
but, typically only for intermediate use ( no really complex docs or fancy macros ), I have to say that Office 2003 would be my first pick if money isn't an issue.
Second, would be the Go variant of OO.o ( http://www.go-oo.org/ ) and Lotus Symphony would be WAAAY at the back.
It's slow at everything, and, for what i do, lacking in features. If money is an issue, then any variant of OO.o plus Gnumeric for really big spreadsheets,
(yes, Gnumeric really is that good and George Ou should have done his tests on it before clamoring that an open source app couldn't match Excel 2003)
Pain is merely failure leaving the body