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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."
O_oo
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.
". . . past their acquisition of Sun . . ."
I think someone's been misreading recent headlines.
All these Oo.o's remind me of family guy
Peter: Oh my God, Brian, there's a message in my alphabets... it says Ooooo!
Brian: Peter those are Cheerios.
Sound Clip
In my dreams, Microsoft Word got replaced by a word processor that naturally creates beautiful documents, that lays them out consistently every time you open them (and between versions), and has a simple easy to use interface.
Open Office is not that program.
However, the beauty of open file formats is that now someone else can write that program, and there will be no barrier to entry, we can start using it right away. In fact, if I am the only person in the world who thinks emacs bindings in a word processor is a good idea, I can use them, and still interoperate with the rest of the world.
Because we all have different ideas of what the perfect word processor will be, this is one step closer to a happy software world.
Qxe4
IBM discontinued the original Symphony suite in 1992, but revived the name in 2007 for their OO.o variant. Apart from being an office suite from IBM, it's not related to the 1980s/early-90s Symphony.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I guess they felt they should get something from the acquisition of Lotus Symphony so that's what they call their version of OpenOffice. Perhaps Microsoft should offer their own version of OO and call it "Microsoft Bob".
Err, correction--- Lotus discontinued the Lotus Symphony suite in 1992, a few years before being bought by IBM in 1995. When IBM bought Lotus (mainly to get Lotus Notes), they also got all the trademarks, and I guess a decade later decided to resurrect one of them. Either way, the current Symphony isn't code-wise related to the old one.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
According to the summary Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.
... Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) ...
It actually uses Eclipse for the GUI and OpenOffice for opening/saving/formatting/displaying documents
I used be an IBM employee, and I can remember the corporate mandate that ALL IBM internal documents had to be made in Lotus SmartSuite instead of Microsoft Office. Guess what... most folks still used Office instead. The primary reason was that SmartSuite sucked, and was about five years behind Office in terms of ease of use and functionality. IBM never bothered to regularly update it as well, leaving it in some 1997-era timewarp when the rest of the world was using Office 2003.
I haven't tried Lotus Symphony myself, but if it's anything like OpenOffice 3, I doubt that most IBM'ers will be raring to convert all of their documents over in a timely manner. Combine that with thousands of customer facing workers that NEED to use Microsoft Office to ensure total compatibility, and you're going to have a hell of a time getting everyone to switch.
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.
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.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Hmm, I'm an eclipse user but I shudder to think of the slowness that marrying eclipse and OO.o would bring about.
All your base are belong to Wii.
And software isn't worse just because it's free.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Was this the result of a focus group reporting that OO.o was too fast?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Are you as stupid as your post appears? IBM are switching to Lotus Symphony which, although it shares a lot of code with OO.o, is an IBM product, developed by IBM staff. This is not 'getting something for free' this is 'using your own products'.
Honestly, Microsoft needs to pay its shills more. The current crop really aren't trying.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I just have a hard time taking /. seriously. Oracle is buying Sun. IBM isn't.
How the hell are we supposed to trust this source for any news when it's always wrong.
The important part is that it uses the same files as OpenOffice and is fully compatible.
To Microsoft, their proprietary formats are the most valuable part of the office suite, it's where there control stems from.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
It uses 200+ megs of RAM just after starting. Take that, Firefox!
Perhaps IBM want their regular employees to kick Team Eclipse's ass until they make it fast.
Or make people quit out of frustration instead of laying them off.
The speed of Symphony shouldn't be your most serious concern - it's fairly snappy on a fast desktop, aside from the loading time.
It should be noted that Symphony is a HEAVILY modified version of OO.o. Symphony has a very clean UI and is extraordinarily easy to use. However, it does not offer all of the same features of OO.o.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
...one third of a million employees being told to use Lotus Symphony...
This is actually an ingenious way for IBM to stress test its hardware - a third of a million internal Symphony bug reports all hitting the server at the same time. Beat that, Oracle.
But it is worse when its worse, in spite of it being free.
"His name was James Damore."
I downloaded Lotus Symphony for free off of their website. I had to give them my email address, but it didn't cost me money. It is definitely proprietary, however, and in my experience it really doesn't do anything that OpenOffice.org doesn't already do. But it does support open formats, and if enough big companies like IBM promote ODF and things like that, it might make it easier for non-Microsoft office suites to compete in the market and share data with each other.
Lotus then created SmartSuite. My favorite office suite off all times, up until now! I wait until something like the InfoBox, but with full keyboard control, is available again. For now, the new Symphony is still far away from that. And it still thinks that default/pure menu bars and button bars make sense nowadays. (Face it: They are an outdated concept.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This is just another in a very long line of people wanting something for nothing.
Give me a break. It's more important to have the capability of reading and writing documents everywhere and not having to worry about information surviving past the arbitrary economic lifespan of some corporation.
By focusing on the ROI on document software, something that should be as prevalent and available as air, you're letting a fixation on the rocks in the road cost you your awareness of the horizon. Look up for once and stop muttering at your shoes.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I'm all for switching to open source software. But MS Office works extremely well.
I think that was in the past, Office 2007 is a super slow dog. I thought the days of typing and then looking at the screen to see the letters draw themselves was something I'd never have to see again (unless it was over a particularly slow WAN link), but no - Office 2007 brings that "Retro" feel right on back.
I'm not sure about the others now, no graphical consistency, no real integration with Windows, settings hidden away in menus that are themselves hidden... its all become a bit of a over-engineered mess. Too much code has been added over the years to it.
OO.o may not be the perfect alternative however, but MSO is not the perfect office suite either.
Very true. Forcing a company to eat their own food could certainly benefit all of us who use it.
A bit of a disclaimer here: I work for IBM.
With that said, the change wasn't as much as an ideological shift to OO software more than it was a licensing issue. The simple fact was that it is quite expensive for MS Office licenses for the entire company. Lotus Symphony has been available to employees for years, but it hasn't really been forced until three or so months ago when a program was pushed to workstations that removed MS Office and installed the Symphony suite if you did not already have it(default builds come with Symphony on it anyway, so it didn't really need to be installed on many workstations). Now if you want a copy of MS Office on your IBM workstation, you have to have a legitimate business need to order it or you can use your own personal copy if you so choose. There are hardly any instances of the former case happening.
It was stated before by another thread here by an ex IBMer that SmartSuite was the default for IBM documents and that people used Office anyway. Yes, that is true. The reason that is true is that Office had become the defacto standard across other industries, and that IBM offered it to employees for free on their workstations, so it was the logical choice to make. Couple that with the fact that SmartSuite was not nearly as developed as Symphony was a few years ago, people couldn't be hassled with converting between file formats, or sending files to other employees or clients and pray that the recipient could actually open it. SmartSuite was a boon on productivity and hence the broader use of Office within the company.
Now IBM is in the market for software. As was stated earlier, the best place to start promoting your own product is from within. In all honesty, a LOT of employees never used Symphony simply because no one knew it existed, and if they did, they did not have the time to learn it. Now that IBM has shifted away from Office for internal uses, our customers may see this and may want to investigate -- that's the theory at least.
The article is a bit misleading in that Symphony is an OO.o variant. Here's a hint: it's not in no more than a humvee is a variant of a boat. The real only similarity is that they both use open standards as their default file types. With that said, however, Symphony still supports MS Office formats and many people DO switch to using those formats as the default anyway. Having said that, there is not much of an uproar as one may think about this switch. Symphony supports both open standards and Office standards, which is the best of both worlds for us.
I guess the bottom line is that this was a BUSINESS decision and not one further the development of open standards. IBM is a business and the business will do what is in its own interest to stay in business. I'm sure it is saving us lots of money, and to be honest I thought this sort of change would be forced down years ago. Either way, it gets the word out on Symphony and gets us off office which saves money. It's the best of both worlds, no?
I'm not sure what the consequences of this would be at the consumer level. The OP talks about breaking MS's monopoly on word suites, and the largest benefit of that would be moving away from .doc formatting. I think the largest concern I have about Microsoft's dominance of the market is that most people seem to assume that .doc is a standard format, and think that it supports any kind of interoperability. Of course it really doesn't and isn't. As far as I can tell however that's only an issue at the consumer level. Sure my friends, and my boss might send me .doc, but any kind professional publisher expects .rtf formats. Basically anything with any legitimacy at all will call for .rtf, which while still spawned by microsoft is at least a standard format that encourages interoperability. A much bigger win would be OpenOffice suites actually supporting .rtf formats properly, so that legitimate work could be done through them.
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.
Other than some addons (fonts, templates), there are two primary advantages that Symphony and StarOffice (Sun's commercial offering of OOo [1]) have over the open source version, and for most individuals, they are not that big a deal.
The first is commercial support. If a business has some problem (usage, program issue), an office suite is a core to productivity. Having support for both questions and in case of something happeninging is vital.
The second is legal CYA. If a business is using a commercial product and something happens, they can just point at their support contracts, and tell people to go blame the vendor. Without this, if an incident happens (leakage of information, mass data loss), there is no "due diligence", and the buck will stop with the company, opening them up to civil lawsuits and criminal investigation, especially if under laws like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or other regulations.
[1]: Technically Openoffice.org came from StarOffice.
I can appreciate the drive to adopt open source.
However, the money I spent for Microsoft Excel has been worth every penny. There's just simply no comparison, and I find it amazing that all of IBM would be willing to abandon it completely, regardless of cost.
/* No Comment */
A version of the infobox (a flexible properties panel that can stay open while you move around in the document) exists in the Mac version of Microsoft Office and in Apple's iWork suite.
IBM's Lotus Symphony may be based on OO.o but it is not open source. Sun originally dual licensed OO.o under the GPL and their own BSD style license, IBM took the BSD-style licensed version and developed Lotus Symphony.
Lotus Symphony also reads some of the old Lotus Smartsuite formats, at least the last generation of them (like .123). I realize this isn't a big deal for most individuals, but in an organization that still has old Smartsuite files floating around, it is useful.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But that's their right to do. That's a freedom that any company gets to exercise. You are free to build a product that becomes useless over time.
And hey, virtually every tangible product does. Your washing machine likely doesn't survive 5 years. A good one ten years. And a really good one twenty years.
MS Office 1995 files still work just as well. And Office 2007 can still produce '95 files.
So it would seem that your complaint is that a company's products don't last for, what, 100 years? 200 years? 2'000 years?
I own and operate two companies. My products don't last 100 years either. I'm not interested in supporting them that long; and I'm not interested in having them cost enough for me to build them quite that well.
What product do you produce? How long does it last?
Now I certainly see your desire to have *information* last for thousands of years. And that's cool. But I don't think it's appropriate to have the creator of an office suite be responsible for ensuring taht retention, do you?
It would seem that _historians_ and _librarians_ and an industry of archivers would be responsible for taking whatever is the current format, and neutering it into an archivable format -- and converting those archives into modern formats as things change over time. You know, just like the way old paper books are kept, maintained, archived, and restored.
I build metal boxes. My metal boxes are designed to serve a 5 to 10 year purpose, with maintenance and cleaning. It's a metal box. If you want to keep it for 200 years, you probably can. It's a metal box. It will likely last. But I don't sell it with a 200 years warranty, nor with a 200 yeras service plan. If you use it as a time-capsule, you're not going to hold me responsible for any anti-worm features, or anti-corosion features, or anything else. That's not what I'm selling.
So if you were to look at MS Office as a program used to create files for present and medium-term future use (10 years), then it serves your needs quite well.
If you want software that is designed to have its files used for hundreds of years, then MS office isn't the right choice. Make a better one. But don't blame ms office. It was never designed for long-term historical features. It was designed to print resumes and reports. It does that well.
Well, I rarely use Office programs at all really, and when I do it's usually a small assignment that I'll just print out and turn in. If I need to share something with others, I'll either use Google Docs or export to PDF. If I actually ever needed to interoperate with others, I might care but most of the time I don't. I'm planning on learning LaTeX for anything more serious though.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Rockoon wrote:
I think a more important question is: Does OpenOffice.org meet the needs of the user? If OpenOffice.org meets the needs of the user, why not choose it over MS Office?
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.
The single biggest advantage of Lotus Symphony, it provides choice, now you can choose from four different versions of Open Office and still have full document compatibility and operating system choice.
It might be viewed as a new corporate status symbol, if you are really significant in the technology sector you produce your own document compatible fork of open office under you own branding and demonstrate your capabilities that to the general public. A way of reminding your employees of the value of the products they produce and putting an end to them staring at the competitors logo.
This sort of corporate identity creation and branding has a significant impact on the way the public views a company, even major hardware players might start making the shift and supply their computers with their branded office suit, browser et al. With open source the investment needed to achieve that is minimal, especially compared to the marketing advantage that can be gained in highlighting the value of their hardware product and the full range of software tools they provide with it all included in the price.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"If you are buying IBM we do not care how much over budget you are..."
BTW, it was a governmental institution... The point was, you would not put IBM on your yard sale list when it is projected/legal life time (5 years) is over. And as far as I know, they are still using IBM PPC 604 based servers I installed in 1995 (14 years and counting...). Of course they are not on the same spot, performing same duties, but they are still useful, as a server class hardware... Given the fact that IBM after sales support in my country sucks (sorry guys), it is a formidable performance...
\begin{cough}
\LaTeX
\end{cough}
I've only got a dual-CPU Xeon running at 2.8Ghz with 3Gb RAM. Pity me for my inconsequential hardware specs, I take it back Microsoft, turns out it was my fault all along, Office's not bloated after all :(
Greetings and Salutations...
Well, as an example of this....QUITE a few years ago, right after college, a good buddy of mine got a job with IBM. The FIRST day on the job he had to copy some documents. Well, he walked to the front of the cube farm and in a loud voice asked "where is the Xerox machine!". It got quiet enough in the cube farm to hear a pin drop...Kind of like that great scene in every Western where the stranger walks into the saloon and even the piano music stops! One of the managers on the floor informed him in no uncertain terms where the THERMOFAX machine was located...
He really thought at first that his career at IBM was going to last about three hours!
Regards
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
I love my Lotus stuff. Lotus 1-2-3 is still my favorite spreadsheet of all time, and WordPro is an excellent word processor. It has enough bells and whistles to do everything I want to do without trying to wipe my nose for me (i.e. popping up a stupid paper clip while I'm trying to work). EARLY versions of Lotus Notes had some glitches, but the last few releases have been awesome. I think Notes and Domino get a bad name because of all the capabilities. From a sys-admin point of view, it might be a challenge, but once you're set up, the tools can be really powerful.