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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.
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
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) ...
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.
Was this the result of a focus group reporting that OO.o was too fast?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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.
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.