25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice

An anonymous reader writes with news that 25,000 staff across 13 hospitals in Denmark will be switching to LibreOffice over the course of the next year. "The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, 'for long term strategic reasons,' which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner [about $7.7 million] worth of proprietary licenses. The ditching of the proprietary alternative is a consequence of the group's move to virtual desktops, allowing staff members to log in on any PC or thin client. The group found that deploying this new desktop infrastructure would 'trigger unacceptably high costs' for proprietary office licenses... The move is Europe's second largest migration project involving public administrations using an open source office suite."

Comments

Stroking a blow!

[The Dawn Of Time]

Stroking a blow for software freedom!

Wait, this was about freedom from paying, not the "real" definition of free... dammit.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[bmo]

Come for the beer; stay for the freedom.

--
BMO

Re:Stroking a blow!

[wrook]

Now what the Libre Office guys need to do is wander up to them and say, "You're saving 40 million Kroner in licensing fees. But is there anything in LO that doesn't meet your standards? Because for a tiny fraction of those savings we'd be happy to fix the problem right away."

Re:Stroking a blow!

[nzac]

When your entire company will operate without MS Office i would have to say that this issue is not going to come up for general staff. (LO uses odf not doc.)

I would think .odf's features would already be implemented in MSO so converting for external use is not terrible.

Im calling you a 'M$ Ninja![!!!]' for trying to convince everyone that this is actually an issue with no simple work around.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but if they do need to show a document to some other party, just export it to PDF.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[tacet]

while, big business can use emacs, for what it's worth, hospitals in denmark, probably need an easy way to produce odf, as it's official standard for denmarks government bodies and lot of documentation flow for hospitals is with government.

libre office does that, so they can cut expenses on software rather than, say patient care or staff salary.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[nospam007]

"...and big businesses..."

Never saw a big business sitting in an emergency room.
If they want to sell something to the hospital, I bet they'll be able to open _any_ document from their clients-to-be.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[Bert64]

On the other hand, ODF is the only approved editable format for use by the Danish government (citation: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2010/02/02/denmark-adopts-odf-and-pdfa-40016263/) in which case your compatibility will actually be better with LO than with MSO.

Remember these are Danish hospitals, in a country with state funded healthcare... ODF and PDF is what they require compatibility with, not any proprietary garbage... It is actually businesses using MSO who will be at a disadvantage when trying to do business with the government, because MS has extremely half-assed ODF support. So you have the situation backwards, the cost of MSO + the cost of dealing with its poor compatibility with everything else, vs the cost of LO.

Also the article mentions they are using a virtual desktop infrastructure, whereby they log in on a dumb terminal and a VM server somewhere fires up a desktop image for them and exports the display to their terminal. Now if you consider their requirements, any of those users who don't require any proprietary windows software can be given a linux image with the same software, thus saving the hospital the cost of windows licenses too.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[rust627]

here is an interesting point

Many years ago I started to use open office, and i could send and receive files in MSO formats ,no problems
then something changed
when I emailed a file in doc format, sometimes it would get to its recipient as garbage, sometimes not.
if I took the file direct to them on a floppy (pre USB), no problems
so I started to send my files as PDF and no more problems, but i did some more investigating.

It seems that when my files were received as garbage, it was almost always that the person receiving them was using IE (6 or above), and it did not matter which office suite they were using.

However when the recipients of my files were using any other email program or if i took my files directly to them, that is to say, if I used any other delivery vector than IE, then, no problems.

Even to the extent that I was the sole person in a small office using OO up to the start of this year, any files I pushed around the office, or emailed to certain people (FF users) always worked fine, But the accounts person needed PDF's every time, (she used IE).

So I am starting to think that it is IE that is causing the doc files from OO (and maybe libre too ?)to be converted to garbage.

Now wouldn't that be interesting, so that if anyone accuses Micro$oft of playing unfair with their office suite by turning files from competitors office suites to garbage, they can say with their hands on their hearts, "no, our office suite will read Doc files from any and all other office suites", knowing all the time that as long as they have a good percentage of the browser market, they can make all other office suites instantly unusable.

Maybe this also applies to files pushed around an office by outlook exchanges, I don't know.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[d4fseeker]

That only works as long as the payment is not complete.
Any support request documentation it's "oh sorry we couldn't open the document"

Re:Stroking a blow!

[bheer]

MS Office has been capable of saving ODFs since Office 2007 - you needed an add-in. Since Office 2010, I _believe_ saving to ODF is available by default.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[toQDuj]

Except if you're a foreigner. Closet fascists...

Re:Stroking a blow!

[UnknowingFool]

which would normally be followed up with a request for another document format like pdf. It's not like anyone will sit around and not get paid because they don't want to bother with converting a format.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[WorBlux]

Exactly, spending 1-2% of what they were spending on licencing could do a lot of good, and it can be justified as spending for the public (worldwide) good.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[Will.Woodhull]

Is MSO's export to ODF any better than its export to HTML was, back at the turn of the century? For that matter, can today's MSO produce HTML that can be edited and maintained?

I cannot answer that since I moved all my document production to Star Office at the end of the last century, then OpenOffice, now LibreOffice. The experience of moving out of the Microsoft ecology into the realm of native ODF tools has been one of freedom, and most notably freedom from hidden constraints.

Microsoft has often released code whose sole purpose was to let them put some feature on a sales brochure, such as "Can export to HTML." That did not mean that every document from MSO could be successfully exported, nor did it mean than any document would be exported in a reasonable format. It simply meant that the sales rep who was talking to your PHB had been trained to demonstrate the feature, possibly with explicit instructions to avoid documents that contained certain features.

When dealing with Microsoft, one has to recognize that its goal has never been to produce quality products; its goal has always been to maximize its profits. That means there is no incentive to make things any better than they need to be to close the sale. This is especially true for features that might increase the risk of a customer escaping the Microsoft ecology.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[Teun]

So you are telling me there are NO insurance companies in Denmark? No claims, no adjusters, nobody to interact with but the government? Must be candyland to have everything work without a single interaction with the outside world.

odf is the Danish government standard for documents, when a company wants to communicate with government entities using a Word Processor format (that's not the same as a document like pdf) then they can comply with the law of the land.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[jvin248]

Hospitals are the big end of the data pipeline. All their suppliers feed off them, big and small. So the suppliers will need to switch if there are any 'problems'. And what is the switching costs for these suppliers? $0. So their managers will tell their workers to just download the LO software and get on with business. As noted elsewhere, the Danish gov't is using open document formats for their work so the Hospital is ok with that major interaction (and most is likely web-based form updates anyway .. switching to Firefox or Midori next?...).

I do consulting work with US Big 3 car OEMs... and trade LO / OOo documents all the time with their MSO infestations. As well with the global supplier pipeline. I go a step further and my whole compute stack is OSS from Linux to LO.

Don't fear freedom.
.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[tibit]

It's not an insurmountable obstacle. Perhaps they'll use some of their $7M savings to pay for a bunch of patches.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[tibit]

Using Excel or any spreadsheet for anything but prototyping or throwaway calculations is insanity anyway. A friend of mine was dealing with cleaning up mess in multibillion USD corporations where all of financial data reconciliation was done using spreadsheets. It's not the right tool for this job.

If your business critical workflow includes clicking in spreadsheets, you're doing it wrong, most of the time.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[tibit]

Forgot to add: obviously this applies whether the spreadsheet is Excel, Gnumeric or OO.org Calc.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[jmottram08]

Exactly! you hit the nail on the head. Start charging for it and it will become better. ohhh wait. . . .

Re:Stroking a blow!

[jabelli]

Take off the tinfoil hat already. The files just got cooked^2 by the web server and IE popped up a save dialog anyway. The PDF files were probably all from ascii postscript and had nothing to get cooked.

P.S. why the hell doesn't <sup> work?

Re:Stroking a blow!

[mikkelm]

"Fuck the free market?" No. It's the government saying "all correspondence must be in format X." That's pretty much how things have worked since the dawn of bureaucracy.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[westyvw]

I would say the opposite is true. They are saying "GO FREE MARKET!", because anyone can make an odf format document. Your problem is right there, the "Excel" sheet should be a spreadsheet one happens to use in Excel. Not to mention that if you are doing more then reports in Excel, you have a bigger problem.

Any company, any of those in a supply chain is free to move to any company they wish that can use an open format. Someone has to make standards, and unfortunately, sometimes it starts with the government.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[realityimpaired]

You could, of course, use Excel (or any spreadsheet) for its intended purpose: working as a spreadsheet. It's actually remarkably effective when you use it as a balance sheet for something like a budget calculation. I wouldn't call that a "throwaway calculation", but we may differ on that point. I keep my monthly budget calculations in a spreadsheet because it's ridiculously easy to edit either the credit or debit column, and have everything update itself automatically. I also use it for back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out whether I can afford to change something I currently have/do. I keep my ledgers elsewhere, but for the actual budget, Excel/gnumeric/etc. are remarkably good tools for the job.

Odd, isn't it? A spreadsheet is good at the job it was originally designed for?

Re:Stroking a blow!

[gmack]

I wouldn't know about that. We have had constant problems between the latest version of MS Office and the latest version of the MS PowerPoint viewer used by our display software. Every once and awhile MS Office will produce a PowerPoint slide that the PP viewer crashes on reading. When this happens the only thing that fixes it is to load it from LibreOffice and resave. MS Office might win out for complicated documents but for the basic stuff LO wins.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[gmack]

More likely is the fact that IE will often second guess the filetype, ignoring whatever the server says about it and, when fed a filetype it doesn't recognise, will spew the raw contents over the screen. It looks just like corruption to the average user but it's really.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[jabelli]

Actually, it's exactly the opposite. I don't think it happens any more, but it used to be that (either by default or user setting, I don't know which) certain web servers would send files they didn't have a mime type for as text. Netscape, at the time, would display this text in the browser, which means not only were all the LFs changed to CRLF, but all the white space was compressed, so you couldn't just save it and uncook it unless you went back and used "right-click/Save As". IE on the other hand would go "*.doc? That's not text, that's a Word Document!" and present the "Save As" dialog.

The servers and/or the browsers have gotten smarter since then, so I don't recall running into this for at least the last ten years.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[fluffy99]

Stroking a blow for software freedom!

Wait, this was about freedom from paying, not the "real" definition of free... dammit.

Europe's second largest migration to an open source office suite? Not even close - http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments. Of course, you should also consider how many large scale migrations have never been completed, reversed mid-course, or just been considered dismal failures due to poor planning. Hopefully they will have a solid plan _before_ they proceed instead of blindly charging forward with an OpenSource-is-better closed mindset. Oh and hopefully they choose a produce that will have support and existing down the road.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[pnutjam]

Because unless the Danes ONLY do business with the government

It looks like they are single payer.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[tibit]

I agree, but in terms of corporate applications, that would be considered "throwaway". I've heard it used to reconcile hundreds of millions of dollars worth of accounts, and a part of a process whose progressive failure caused failures on the billion dollar scale. Spreadsheets have their place, but business critical roles where millions of dollars are involved is not one of them.

I use pyspread with some in-house tweaks for unit-checked engineering calculations. That's about as far as I'd go, though.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[cbiltcliffe]

You mean like the guy who has the B&W laser as his default printer, because it's cheaper to run, and then sets up a document that needs to be printed on the expensive colour printer?
They get all the formatting set up, make sure it looks perfect, then change the printer to the colour one, and.....word salad?

Keep in mind this is on the same computer, with obviously the same version of Word, same patch level, etc. The only difference is the printer used.

Why does this happen? Why would Microsoft do something so retarded as to make formatting dependent on the printer driver currently used by the document? And then, why would they continue to do the same retarded thing for 15 years? Surely this has caused more frustration for people than any document conversion between MSO and OOo/LO.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[LingNoi]

So it IS the government saying "fuck the free market!" and trying to ram through formats.

ODF is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Of course governments are going to use it! It's not the government controlling the free market.

Microsoft can happily make a word processor that reads and writes ISO/IEC 26300:2006 and compete. Unfortunately they thought it more easier simply to bribe the ISO committee into making their own proprietary format an ISO standard. Something that has never happened to ISO before. In cases of document formats it's the free market corrupting the system and forcing minor players out of the market.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[vruum]

odf is the Danish government standard for documents, when a company wants to communicate with government entities using a Word Processor format (that's not the same as a document like pdf) then they can comply with the law of the land.

the most recent source I could find http://www.computerworld.dk/art/115407/it-ministerens-dokumentformat-er-en-sikkerhedsbombe said both odf and ooxml had been rejected due to immaturity (pdf being the proposed replacement???). Also, I always cringe a little when I see stories like this, since the outcome is almost always the same. In about a year the story is gonna be how OOO didn't live up to the requirements and couldn't fullfil the complex use-cases of the institution, which basically means that it didn't integrate well with some proprietary piece of (MS) infrastructure. or the users didn't like it because it was to different from the office suite they have at home. My only hope is that they've actually taken a look at some of these earlier failures and tried to extract some experience from them. maybe even setting aside some of their license savings to training and integration testing and development.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[RockDoctor]

No what will happen is like most government crap they'll pass the costs over to businesses who will know have to deal with TWO Office suites and all the bullshit and compatibility that comes with it.

Businesses don't have to deal with two office suites. They do have to comply with the law.

How long have you been employed by Microsoft (or a front company for their PR department)?

Re:Stroking a blow!

[RockDoctor]

Which part of

That only works as long as the payment is not complete

did you not read or understand?

Once payment is complete (note that word!), then pretty much any support request is met with "I'm sorry, our support worker for that arena need all documents submitted in 1982 VolksWriter files and written in Ancient Sumerian." Support (on a completed contract) is a cost, to be minimised. If there is no expectation or hope of a repeat sale, or re-licensing, then there is no reason to expect any income stream to come from responding to support requests. The only reasons for then honouring support requests are contractual, reputation or ... well, it's business so "honour" is a 4-letter word.

Which is why our software isn't sold, it's leased. And the supprot (sic) department have (and try to adhere to) a 3-rings phone policy. And we fix bugs. And they'll read any document they can (including ODF formats).

Re:Stroking a blow!

[rolfc]

No, the market has done what it should.

Expensive and proprietary?

Free and Free?

Which would the market choose?

Re:Stroking a blow!

[UnknowingFool]

Your post makes no sense. First you're saying that once payment is made, the business will never honor anything. Then you're saying that the software is leased. Your first assumption is that one and only payment is ever made and then the business will flee out of the country with the money; that this government entity, unhappy, with unanswered support requests have no power or recourse. Or that the contract isn't full of penalties. Or that the business doesn't want repeat business.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[RockDoctor]

No business will do anything that is a pure cost ; if they do anything beyond the completion of their contract, it's as part of trying to get the next contract.

I don't know what support the Danish government leases for LO, assuming they have anything, but having support on a lease keeps them keen, because the support company is always trying to justify the next pay cheque.

On the other hand, as a sole supplier of proprietary software, we like leasing software because we get regular payments for it. And if the customer stops paying, the software stops working. Which keeps us honest, and them.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[Bert64]

I know that, which is why i made the statement "because MS has extremely half-assed ODF support" as opposed to "because MS has no ODF support"...
The ODF support in Office 2010 loses formatting, and refuses to save things like cross references and tables of contents despite the fact that ODF can support these. Many documents when saved by Office 2010 directly into ODF format, retain less formatting than when saved in a proprietary binary format, and then converted into ODF by LibreOffice.

Also they only support an older version of the spec, and not the current 1.2 version, and (seemingly as an act of intentional bad faith) created their own formula language in their ODF 1.1 support, instead of doing the same as other implementors of the format (and which their own plugin already does).

LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[Kensai7]

And it's important to notice they asked for LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. The really free version.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[Kensai7]

YOU likely neither know nor care about giving Oracle the finger, coward. I bet the guys making these decisions know every bit of them.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[cheekyjohnson]

Now that we've established that you're about 14

I think that's a nice example of guilt by association.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[hcs_$reboot]

LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. The really free version

OpenOffice is not free? According to Google, it is Open Source (and see the new Google Best Guess feature...).
I don't want to be the devil's advocate, but whatever one may think about Oracle, it isn't fair to tell OpenOffice is not free.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

The product is free, but the project itself and the development processes are less free.

It sounds like playing with words, but there are direct consequences of these differences.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[drolli]

???

So a fork of a open source project is immediatly magically more free than the original? Thats an interesting vievpoint.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[RobbieThe1st]

Note that LibreOffice added a whole set of packages(go-oo) that were not in OpenOffice due to people being unwilling to assign copyright to Sun. So, yes, by day 1 it was *magically* better and more free(as not all copyrights are owned by the controlling interest, it's nearly impossible to change the license in the future).

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[rubycodez]

The world cares that open office is Oracle Abandonware. The world gives that the finger. All of Oracle's open source projects are turning into train wrecks. Oracle's acquisition of Sun is turning into a train wreck. Get off the train.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[WorBlux]

OO required copyright assignment. LO doesn't

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[jockm]

So really free to software engineers, not to regular people...

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[Will.Woodhull]

It does seem like Oracle has been gifted with the reverse Midas touch. Where everything it touches turns to shit.

Oracle could probably turn this around. A good way of starting would be to drop all current lawsuits, reduce its legal staff and their costs by about 80%, and turn its attention back to making and supporting software. But I do not think that Oracle is going to do that. Not under its current CEO.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[Kjella]

So does all FSF projects, if that's the new definition of free then tons of vital tools are non-free.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[WorBlux]

FSF guarantees that it will always be under the GPL. Oracle or Sun don't make this promise and don't have quite the same stellar reputation. And even in the case of the FSF, some coders don't like it.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[WorBlux]

Yep, and the devs are the most important link in most OSS software projects.

whatever happened to

[Osgeld]

software with a specific goal in mind, why is this medical system ran by excel and nothing else?

Re:whatever happened to

[MichaelSmith]

Maybe its not. If you had a large pool of staff who needed to edit the occasional office document (say a doctor who needs to fill out an HR form) then a free office package makes a lot of sense.

Re:whatever happened to

[MichaelSmith]

Maybe its not. If you had a large pool of staff who needed to edit the occasional office document (say a doctor who needs to fill out an HR form) then a free office package makes a lot of sense.

If their medical staff are filling out medical or office forms stored in Word format, their IT staff has no idea what they're doing.

I think its stupid too but its the normal way things are done at my workplace.

Re:whatever happened to

[MacTO]

I've maintained corporate systems which relied heavily upon specialized software, and virtually none of the employees needed an office suite for the official business functions. Yet they insisted upon using such software to jot down quick notes or make quick calculations. Things that they really could have used calculator or notepad for, but they were more productive using the office suite (if for no other reason than they weren't wasting their and our time complaining about it).

I could easily imagine that being the case here. After all, if the hospitals' operations depended upon that proprietary office suite, it would be a bugger to switch to LibreOffice.

Re:whatever happened to

[GNious]

Hospitals, at least in Denmark, are run by doctors, because supposedly only doctors knows how to run them.
Apparently, your skill with a scalpel is directly proportional to your skill at organizational management.

Re:whatever happened to

[lucidlyTwisted]

Hospitals, at least in Denmark, are run by doctors, because supposedly only doctors knows how to run them.

Sounds better than the UK where hospitals are run by managers who have no clue about medicine, waste money on outside consultants/PFI-deals, spunk cash on fat bonuses for the pen-pushers while cutting costs on front-line services and who hound whistle-blowers into the dust.

Re:whatever happened to

[donscarletti]

Medical forms yes, since a doctor must fill in maybe 50 a day, they come in a limited verity of forms and they need to be centrally archived, this would be the classic use-case of a relational database. Doctors should be using a database to manage records, otherwise information is disorganised and it is very unlikely that the patient would be receiving the same level of care as if they were.

Office forms? Who gives a shit, if the total time wasted on doing it in a word processor is not much more than what it takes to train the doctors how to do it in whatever tool they should be using, then just leave it.

And what do they really need a word processor for? Same things normal people use them for: writing letters, writing submissions to medical journals, office memos, whatever. You know, the thousand miscellaneous usecases that always fall through the miriad cracks of whatever office automation system that is supposed to handle everything.

Anyway, it's not such a huge problem since the doctors I know tend to be very computer focused. Probably it uses a similar part of the brain. My uncle who's a doctor seems to have his surgery database upgraded every two years or so and has gotten an IT department for a surgery with 6 doctors.

Re:whatever happened to

[f3rret]

software with a specific goal in mind, why is this medical system ran by excel and nothing else?

It's not, they have a proper system for the actual medical stuff, not entirely sure what they'll need LO for.

Either way, go Danes.

Re:whatever happened to

[Duncan J Murray]

An Office suite is needed for witing letters, handover lists, running audits, preparing and giving presentations etc..., but they aren't used that often in hospital by the clinical staff.

Also, at most hospitals, a lot of the clinical software (i.e. for dictated letters or letters stored electronically) is integrated with microsoft office.

This is great news, and I hope it works out for them.

Re:whatever happened to

[Bert64]

If the doctors are already used to the medical forms, which for the reasons you state are done in a database driven system, then it makes sense for other less important forms to be done in the same or a similar system. Not much point wasting the doctor's time filling in trivial forms.

Re:whatever happened to

[Bert64]

Trivial tasks, like writing short letters, doing simple calculations or viewing documents sent by others (which should have been sent as pdf)... The same thing that probably 99% of users of such software do, which is why the price tags charged by proprietary vendors are so disgusting.

Actually, ideally we need everyone using ODF, and then a selection of applications depending on requirement. Most people would be able to do with a very simple, ultra lightweight application and would probably get on better with it since the toolbars wouldn't be cluttered with advanced features they never use.

Re:whatever happened to

[Zironic]

That's pretty much what the article says. They have 25,000 computers, currently 10,000 of them have Office since only a subset of the staff have any need of the software. However when changing to virtual desktops, they'd be required to buy another 15,000 licences according to their vendor, so they said fuck no.

Re:whatever happened to

[Duncan J Murray]

Would you like to tell me who, apart from doctors, understand what 'good' treatment actually is? It's not about skill with a scalpel, it's about being ultimately responsible for the welfare of your patient, and therefore understanding clearly where all of the impediments to this happening occurs.

At our hospital we have a 'ring-fenced bed', which is a bed kept empty on a haematological unit, save only for haematological emergencies requiring chemotherapy. Unless the manager understands why a patient with acute leukaemia is a medical emergency and can only managed in one (or two) places in the hospital, then actually, it's the physicians who are best placed to manage the ward in this way.

Re:whatever happened to

[Dominic]

Except that getting doctors to run hospitals is completely stupid. They are massively more expensive than managers, and when you do medicine at university you tend to learn how to treat people, not run businesses. That's not to say that *appropriate* managers aren't doctors (people such as clinical directors), but if you think that doctors are the best people to decide which printer paper supplier to use, or the logistics company that is responsible for transporting samples around the country, or the million other things that running a multi-million pound business (which is what a hospital is), then you are severely misguided.

Only 3% of NHS staff are managers. That is lower than pretty much any company in the oh-so-efficient private sector. The NHS is also the most efficient healthcare system of seven top industrialised nations: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10375877

You, sir, are a right-wing troll. I suggest sticking to facts in your future posts.

Re:whatever happened to

[lucidlyTwisted]

Except that PFI is a right-wing policy. Using vast army of outside consultants is a right-wing policy.
The eye-watering costs and problems of PFI are well documented (for people who don't know, PFI is a scheme whereby a private company buys/builds something like a hospital/school and the leases it to the state. The costs all kept "off-book" so it looks like savings are being made, when in fact the costs are generally double the normal state-funded routess. It also lumbers future generations with massive debt).
The horrendous treatment of NHS whistle-blowers is also well documented.
The "cherry-picking" of patients and services by out-side contractors is also well documented (and in some cases, this has led to serious misdiagnoses).

So when it comes to the likes of the NHS I am, in fact, anything but right-wing.

Re:whatever happened to

[oobayly]

The NHS is also the most efficient healthcare system of seven top industrialised nations: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10375877 [bbc.co.uk]

I don't know which is scarier, that the NHS is "efficient", or that other countries have it worse.

Re:whatever happened to

[rtb61]

Let's be more clear on this. We are up to 14 versions of M$ Office, so not free once but free fourteen times and, in those upgrades, hardware upgrades forced by software upgrades forced by data incompatibility and add retraining, data conversions. So either make the switch once or pay and pay and pay.

Of course with open applications, the idea of open documents also grows. With many different hospitals sharing generic documents and macros, saving development costs and, easing training requirements, this open document development spread not just nationally but globally as language permits. Sharing and caring in document development can save billions just in document production world wide.

Re:whatever happened to

[Registered Coward v2]

Hospitals, at least in Denmark, are run by doctors, because supposedly only doctors knows how to run them.

Sounds better than the UK where hospitals are run by managers who have no clue about medicine, waste money on outside consultants/PFI-deals, spunk cash on fat bonuses for the pen-pushers while cutting costs on front-line services and who hound whistle-blowers into the dust.

I think it really depends on the doctors and the hospital's structure. I've worked with doctors who run hospitals very well - they understand it's a business, and no money means no mission of helping people; and know how to control costs and doctors in an effective manner.

I've worked with others where every doctor thinks they are the CEO and wants what they want - so they have different stuff for every doctor because they want *that* specific brand; and everyone wonders why they are losing money but no one will change their ways. Generally, in those cases, every doctor *knows* they are the smartest person in the room and so is unwilling to change.

Re:whatever happened to

[MichaelSmith]

Microsoft fight tooth and nail against floating licenses. I occasionally need visio at work so I have a $1000 copy of visio installed on my windows box even though at any given time we are using 10% of the licenses we own. The limiting case is the hospital where 99% of what you do is in this purpose built hospital management system (or whatever) but this little corner case hangs around where somebody needs to type up a letter for somebody's doctor or draft a letter of resignation or whatever so they chuck in a free word processor to fill the gap.

But I don't think there is any long term planning in it. No reuse. Just I need a document now and then I will probably throw it away.

Re:whatever happened to

[GNious]

Good treatment, and the ability to keep a bed empty, does not make a person perfect for running an organization the size of modern hospitals.
I think that assuming ONLY doctors can sanely run a hospital is wrong, and is part of why hospitals in Denmark are insanely inefficient.

Now, nowhere did I advocate having beancounters and asskissers and other subsections of MBAs running hospital - only noting that having exclusively medical staff act as managers on all levels is stupid beyond belief.
I should also think that if doctors can be taught basic financial skills, people from a non-medical background can be made to understand, or at least appreciate, the unique requirements that comes with the care of humans. Admittedly, observing how the elderly are treated in Denmark makes me doubt that to some degree, but then at least we can look at mixing the two: Having trained medical professionals be part of executive management, but also having trained organizational professionals be part of the daily management.

Note: My own background is one of IT, and I am now part of middle-management. My primary tasks include ensuring that consultants working for me (who are far from all with an IT background, or position), are listened to and their input included when making assessments. I am also responsible for ensuring that the business-specific needs of my customers are met optimally. None of this qualifies me for running a hospital, but if I manage to understand the needs of a Romanian assembly line providing parts to an American OEM, others can manage to understand the relative needs of hospitals, without being having been elbow deep in intestines.

Re:whatever happened to

[Will.Woodhull]

As opposed to hospitals in the United States that used to be run by doctors but are now run by specialists in Hospital Administration. If you graph things out over the last 60 years, the rise of the role of Hospital Adminstrator parallels the rise of the USA health care crisis.

Gee, perhaps hospitals should not be run for profit; perhaps there should be some other goal for health care.

Just saying.

Re:whatever happened to

[Duncan J Murray]

I agree with what you're saying. The problem here in the UK is that there sadly isn't such a close dialog between the hospital managers and the doctors. Frequently, financial decisions are made which impact badly on patient care, and often finances, too. I think it's pretty paramount that financial decisions are always taken in the light of the clinical requirements. And vice-versa is true, that clinical decisions are taken with an understanding of the financial costs. It's simply not the case doctors can be left elbow deep in intestines with non-clinical managers taking decisions which will influence patient care.

One example of this is a cost-saving measure implemented at a unnamed hospital, where a decision was made not to ever employ any 'locum' doctors to fill empty positions on the doctor's rota (i.e. due to sick leave, maternity leave, or simple someone leaving their post). What was done instead was to spread the remaining doctors ever-more thinly over the patients. So instead of a ratio of 1:13 (3 doctors on a 40-bedded ward), it could drop to 1:20 if one was not around, and even 1:40. The managers, not being on the ward, and not involved in patient care, were happy that at least those patients had a responsible doctor. The situation on the ward, however, was untenable. Lets just say in an imaginary perfect world, you could have 10 minutes to talk to your doctor everyday, in hospital, and 10 minutes for the doctor to examine you and look at your relevant observations and investigations. Give the doc 5 minutes to document his findings and plan in the notes and then 10minutes to do the jobs required for you for that day. God forbid you are unwell, and need a cannula, a chest drain, and more than one review that day, but even then, if that doctor worked from 9-5pm without a lunch break or loo break, the doc could see 13 patients. What this means of course is that the care provided when the ratio is 1:20 or even 1:40 is awful, resulting in delayed discharges, deaths that shouldn't have happened, substandard care, and overall a huge cost for the hospital in terms of patient beds and litigation.

When the managers lose touch with the doctors, this is what ends up happening.

Re:whatever happened to

[vux984]

then it makes sense for other less important forms to be done in the same or a similar system.

Really? Does it make sense to have IT create a centrally managed database hosted form to track the Christmas gift exchange? The lotto pool a few nurses and doctors in the maternity ward run? The checklist on who would be at the softball game?

Someone down in receiving is comparing a few shipping quotes... and wants to summarize the information.

Julie and Sally are swapping some shifts because Sally's mom is really sick, and they want to keep track of the hours...

The cleaning staff have been routinely missing a few items, so someone is running a spreadsheet checklist with all the issues being tracked against the dates to document the issue.

Pretty much everyone needs word processors and spreadsheets, and its asinine to deny them these tools.

Re:whatever happened to

[lsatenstein]

A nice feature of an office suite is that there is an infinite electronic scratchpad. That functionality directed at using a spreadsheet to experiment with what-if calculations is a reason that the desk calculator is rarely used. So, LibreOffice it is, and hope to have it on a tablet soon.

Re:whatever happened to

[m50d]

The people who run a hospital have to know how to manage people, yes. But they also have to know how actual medicine works, otherwise they'll make stupid decisions. I think that, expensive as it is, hospital managers should be required to have training in both, i.e. be doctors who've then been sent to do MBAs or vice versa.

Re:whatever happened to

[Bert64]

If they are business related forms, then they should be stored and managed on a system operated by the business, for accountability reasons if nothing else... Do you think the business doesn't want to keep track of the hours swapped by julie and sally?
What if the building catches fire and sally can't be located because she isn't there, while julie is trapped in a burning room with none searching for her because they think she's at home?

Christmas gift exchanges, lotto pools and softball games are not a business critical function and the business has no requirement to provide tools for doing this.
Also for such tasks, there are lots of free online services designed for such things that make it much easier for multiple people to share information.

I'm not saying people should be denied word processors and spreadsheets, i'm saying that there are many situations where such tools are simply inappropriate. And that also, for 99% of uses (especially the ones mentioned above) msoffice or libreoffice are grossly over specced, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars on software where 99% of the users will use 1% of the features is insane.

Freedom isn't free.

[khasim]

... which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner [about $7.7 million] worth of proprietary licenses.

I hope that they're going to use SOME of that savings to hire a programmer or two to help improve LibreOffice. In Denmark, of course. Might as well keep the work local and focus on local requirements.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[1mck]

I totally agree with you about the fact that there aren't any real "advanced users" out there! I would say that 99% of the people out there that are using office software wouldn't know if they were using M$ or LO. In fact, if you were to "only" have a shop that runs LO, and had the staff trained on it, then they'd think the MS Office would stupid and counter intuitive and really hard to work. Most of the people that I've worked with don't have a clue about technology, so the fact that 25,000 staff across 13 hospitals in Denmark will be switching to LibreOffice over the course of the next year indicates that someone has their head on straight over there in Denmark...finally!

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Here in the UK, the National Health Service ditched an enterprise-wide agreement for MS Office ; a back-of-envelope calculation suggests it must have been worth around $100M a year - imagine what could be developed for LibreOffice for only a fraction of this.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[bluegreen997]

I have to wonder if this is part of the reason why MS has forced their 'ribbon' menu on everyone. To force the majority of those who still use MSO to become used to that setup.

And I also wonder if MSO was not a defacto standard would MS have provided an option to include the standard drop down menu/tool bar setup rather than forcing UI changes on people.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[WorBlux]

I always cringe when people do that, as they corrupt easily and are hard to export, plus a huge spreadsheet is far less efficient than a proper database. Although excel is Turing Complete, gnumeric has more functions built in, and and has historically used more accurate algorithms. If you've got more than 10 pages of date you should think about implementing something else. For a hundred pages it should be a top priority.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[Will.Woodhull]

There are a lot of ways other than code development for contributing to a FOSS project.

What would be great is if the Danes would contribute the written end user procedures they need to develop anyway to the LO project, under a FOSS copyright license so that the procedures can be adopted and modified as needed by other LO users. Adding to a public how-to library would be a major way of contributing back to the LO community.

Bonus points if the Danes spend a little of what they have saved in licensing fees to edit their contributions to make them as generic as possible, and as easy as possible to adapt to other health care institutions, etc.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[Will.Woodhull]

Often those businesses with heavy reliance on Excel and Word macros have a scattering of secretaries and low level functionaries who basically set their own hours and pick and choose which tasks they will deign to take on while everyone looks the other way. Because each one of them is the only one who developed some pet MSO project that the department now depends on, and each one is the only one who can maintain the gawdawful sucker. IT might be willing to replace it with something that is properly designed and almost certainly not written as a pile of macros in an Office document, but that would mean that some PHB would have to admit to having given away effective control of daily operations to one of his minions.

I have been away from the scene for about a decade, and perhaps things have changed but I doubt it.

I would also guess that this misuse of office suite documents is fading away. Being replaced by HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP. That is the more sensible way of building and distributing interactive documents.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[jvin248]

The 'ribbon' was a 'new coke' oops for Microsoft. They've backed away/tweaked it.

I've seen more people forced to migrate from MSO 2003 to 2007/2010 that like LO better because it's more familiar and faster to use.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[tibit]

That's precisely how NOT to use Excel, even though many people think it's fine and dandy. It's a road to hell in terms of stability of data. I'd take a standalone VB6 application any day over something that tries to do the same thing but crams a spreadsheet somewhere in there just so people don't have to "carry executables around". Yeah sure.

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[umghhh]

Well I do not think so (although I admit that would be nice). I think the community and so called analysts do misunderstand the way the open source actually affects us all - if we did not have all that free software with reasonable good quality we would have to pay much more for closed source. So even if majority of us stay on M$ software we should still appreciate. Gosh - even m$ should appreciate as without a good competition there is no need to improve.

The funny part in this all is that at the end it is not the quality of issues with format of documents but money. I recall IT stuff in a corporation I used to work for told me on request that the reason why we stay on m$ is because of compatibility etc and this while explaining to me why m$ word document that I opened in one environment did not look as it should because different departments used different revision of word have been installed there. Well one can only wonder how far from reality an average uninformed indiHvidual is and still world kind of works...

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[TheRealGrogan]

I have often told clients replacing their computers, only to find a trial of a horrid new version of MS Office, that "You'll find OpenOffice to be more like Microsoft Office than Microsoft Office is these days" (I use LibreOffice in place of it now, but the same thing can be said)

These aren't people locked into features of Microsoft Office, they are just ordinary people with ordinary documents and spreadsheets who like ordinary menus that give them access to ordinary application features at the top of their program. For people who send .doc and .xls to other people, I set the program to save in MSOffice 97/2000/XP format by default. (That's not exactly doing the world any favours, but I do want their files to be correctly readable by everyone, including the many users of older MSOffice versions. I know lots of people still using Office 2000.)

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[Stormthirst]

I wonder what the Danish translations within the software are like? If you want to keep the focus of changes to the software, why not improve the Danish bits?

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[1mck]

When I was in university, the teachers had absolutely no idea what they were doing, and so they would use the latest Microsoft format, which was the .docx, and you should have seen all of the students freak out because hardly any of them could open the files up or if they could it wasn't properly formatted. I had to show all of my teachers how to set it so that they would only send it in 2000/XP .doc format. What was surprising, was that nearly all of my classmates used MS Office, and yet they couldn't access Microsoft's OWN formats! One teacher even suggested downloading Open Office so that the files could be opened. Now, if that doesn't show how closed sourced a supposedly open format is, then I don't know what is! If the hospital demands that all formats within the agency to be odt, then little by little this will start a trend amongst the end users because they'll see how easy it'll be to use this open format and won't have to go through all the bs that Microsoft puts them through. This isn't going to happen overnight, but it will happen. I'm going to be volunteering at a non-profit organization, and they have a really old database program, and the executive director is thinking of using LO Base, so I'm going to push for it because if they can't afford the Microsoft tax they'll be able to move over to Linux with absolutely no interoperably issues:-)

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[TheRealGrogan]

Yes, Microsoft's stranglehold has a lot of momentum that's not easy to overcome. Also, in any organization there's always someone who fears change, and fights to keep the status quo. There are also people susceptible to the manipulations of consultants and solution providers. The well funded FUD campaigns from Microsoft, work on people too.

I'm sure anyone who's put Linux on people's computers has run into problems with some, as soon as they talk to their smarty pants daughter or someone who tell them they must have "Genuine Microsoft Windows" or some such shit. People can't get any help from their friends when they don't use Windows. It's like that with Apple computers around here too.

There's a whole world out there, away from Microsoft. It's true that if people get used to a lot of the same apps on Windows that we use, it will be easy to transition them to a better environment. (Firefox, Open or LibreOffice, Gimp, Mplayer front ends that blow that stupid Windows Media Player back to the sulphurous, farting pit it came from etc.)

Good luck with your plan :-)

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[FaxeTheCat]

>What was surprising, was that nearly all of my classmates used MS Office, and yet they couldn't access Microsoft's OWN formats!

Well, they could if they installed the plugin that Microsoft provided for all Office versions back to Office 2000... Maybe it was not only the teachers that "had absolutely no idea what they were doing"...

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[1mck]

That's what I thought, but all of them had installed the plugin, and it just didn't work. I tried to get a buddy's Office 2000 to open .docx using the plugin, and I couldn't get it to work. I even went into safe mode to try to get it to install, but it just plain didn't work. Most people just don't know about technology, and yet we thrust it upon them, and demand that they know what they're doing. Most of them barely know how to use a mouse for crying out loud!

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[1mck]

Thanks, I really think I'm going to be able to convince her about the benefits of open sourced, free software. She needs a good calendar program as they paid for some calendar software and can only have 3 computers use it. What would be the best one that is very user friendly, and can be installed on all the present computers and will be only for their agency so that others cannot access it from outside the agency?

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[TheRealGrogan]

I'm not terribly familiar with calendar apps, but Evolution is probably the best known choice. (It tries to be like "Microsoft Outlook" and probably would fit in rather well for people used to MSOffice)

http://library.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/usage-calendar.html.en

There's also Mozilla calendar apps to look at. (e.g. Mozilla Sunbird, or the new calendar app that comes with Thunderbird)

I'm sorry I can't give you any specific advice.

"Proprietary Office Suite"

[93 Escort Wagon]

Why not just name it? Repeating "proprietary office suite", over and over, just makes the author sound like an fool.

Re:"Proprietary Office Suite"

[marcello_dl]

If you are curious to know which office suite it is, just hang around the it department managers of these hospital. They will likely be taken to dinner by sales drones of that suite for the next 12 months or so :)

Re:"Proprietary Office Suite"

[f3rret]

Why not just name it? Repeating "proprietary office suite", over and over, just makes the author sound like an fool.

Can't be entirely sure, but IIRC at least one hospital I went to here used the Lotus office thing, not MS Office.

Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[c.r.o.c.o]

I am NOT trolling. Mod me whichever way you wish, but this is a real issue I had with Open Office that made me gave up on it. To put it simply, when running Open Office on a computer running Windows 7 32bit, the spell check would NOT work.

Here are a few things I remember doing. I tried downloading several versions. I tried installing it both as a regular user AND as administrator. I tried deleting, adding and modifying dictionaries. I tried changing languages between different English variants. I tried changing permissions on executables. I even reinstalled Windows 7. I struggled for almost a week to make it work, reading manual pages and searching forums. In the end I gave up trying to fix it. Now here's the kicker though... I did find a way that would fix the issue temporarily. If I would browse to the install folder of Open Office, right click on swriter.exe and select "run as administrator", the spell check would work. So I know all the executables, java environment and dictionaries were in place, but somehow the permissions were wrong and unfixable.

This happened around September of last year, when I was in the middle of my last year at university and I had a LOT of projects to complete. I had to almost live within SPSS and a word processor. Always using the workaround was a chore I did not need. So I completely gave up on OpenOffice and used my student discounts to buy OpenOffice's main competitor.

I can't figure out what is the real point of this post. I suppose I'm just venting, wishing I could get that week of my life back. Oh yes, and sometimes you really do get what you pay for...

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of venting, how about asking on a forum or submitting a bug report?

OOo English Forum

Report Bugs (OOo Wiki)

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that everybody here knows that submitting OOo bugs is an absolute waste of time. Guess what? You still can't group images properly, Impress doesn't wrap links, and to rotate an image in writer you have to open Draw to fix it and then paste it back into writer. FFS, Impress froze just then when I tried to create a new presentation to see if link wrapping is finally fixed! I know I should be *fixing* these bugs rather than just complaining about them, but who honestly has the time to familiarise themselves with the massive OOo/Libreoffice code base just to fix something so trivial that it should have been fixed years ago?

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had this problem and tracked it down to the document not registering the language. The only way I found to consistently fix it was to highlight all the text and then right click in the bottom centre information bar which displays the language - it'll be blank - and select the language of choice! Good luck.

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[drolli]

Oh yes. All the time when i hit some really obvious, annoying and simple bug and looked it up to discover it had been there for a long time.

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[dhanson865]

+1 mod parent up (AC that mentioned selecting a language to enable spell checking, the help specifies that selecting "none" as the language disables spell checking so it's a good general tip)

Oh @c.r.o.c.o (123083)

I'm using Libre Office 3.3 and spell check works perfectly. I'm using XP SP3 32 bit so it's a different OS but it does work.

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[impaledsunset]

Try reporting it against LibreOffice then, another management, another attitude towards bug reports. It's much more likely that your issue will be fixed, and by the way that's one of the reasons why LibreOffice is a good idea – fixing what's wrong with OpenOffice.org.

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[aztracker1]

It should probably default to the running user's language.

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[drb226]

I am NOT trolling...
sometimes you really do get what you pay for...

*insert glaring reddit eyes here*

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[Rexdude]

Yeah, because open source projects have such a track record of immediately fixing a bug and providing a patch the next day when you really urgently need it, when you're not a corporate customer paying them for the support.

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[buchanmilne]

This story is about LibreOffice, not OpenOffice.org. In LibreOffice (3.3.2) on Windows 7 x64, I don't have this problem ...

Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a Danish Hospital. If the Microsoft Office spell checker for Danish is as bad as it is for Swedish(*), then using LibreOffice is an improvement. Using something that is so bad that it is useless, is much better then using something which is so bad that it is debilitating.

Other native languages in extensive use in Denmark is Faroese (Faroe is a Danish domain), Greenlandic (Greenland is a Danish domain) and German (part of main Denmark is German-speaking), but outside the areas of Denmark where they are the main languge, and to some extent even in these areas, speakers of these languages are pretty much neglected or discriminated against by the Danish government. As far as I know, only German have a decent spell checker in MS Office.

The whole world don't use English in every context, and that is a good thing. As dysfunctional as the modern English language is (post Shakespearian time), that would stunt all progress in the world.

(*) Swedish and Danish use slightly different rules for spelling (more different then between US-English and UK-English, but not as different as between English and Dutch), but is considered as one language by some linguists. Spoken Swedish and Danish aren't more different then dialects of English and almost half the Swedish population, living in the southern parts of Sweden that was conquered from Denmark in the 16th and 17th century, actually speak East Danish dialects and from a strict ethnological/historical point of view, they are Danes [but from the same ethnological/historical point of view, people from my part of Sweden is Swedes (as in the Swedes described by Roman and Arab historians and explorers, and in the smaller area of Sweden from which I steam, we are also mostly Geats (the same ethnicity that was usually called Goths when living outside historical Geatland)) as well as Norsemen (as in the Vikings that scorched and pillaged Britain and South and West Europe, and founded Normandy), and the people living in the area around the Swedish capital Stockholm is Rus (the Vikings that scorched and pillaged Byzantine, Balticum and Finland, and conquered/founded what would later become Russia), that started to identify them-self as Swedes in the 14th century].

Re:They are in for a suprise

[AHuxley]

Don't worry. The US company will offer low rent just to stop the idea from spreading.
If that fails they will call in the State Dept.
Words will be had with the gov and a list of troublemakers presented. People who pushed for 'free' will get new jobs, be offered packages or new safe positions well away from the stress of buying software.
A new cost saving deal will done the new staff and US exports will be safe again.

A more important reason

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Dagens Medicin, a news site for local and regional administrations, quotes Thomsen explaining that most of the hospital workers, doctors and nurses, will have little trouble using Libre Office. "Most of them do not need the advanced features of these suites."

More important than thatt, 20 years from now they'll be able to open the documents they create today.

Re:A more important reason

[Anonymous Coward]

1991 was 20 years ago. So you'd be looking at documents created in Word for Windows 2.0.

If you want to open those files in Word 2010, you can follow the instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922849#w2010

So if your requirement is ability to open files 20 years old, it seems like Microsoft Office does the trick.

OpenOffice/LibreOffice can trace their roots back to StarOffice, and the version avaliable in 1991 was what, StarOffice 1.0?

So the question is: Can Open/LIbreOffice open documents from StarOffice 2.0?

If it CAN'T then that means that actually, your assertions is wrong in terms of which product to chose for backwards compatibility.

Re:A more important reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize stating facts was considered fanboiism.

If the primary requirement is 20 year backwards compatibility, and both products have been around for over 20 years, then isn't "whether or not they can open documents from 20 years ago" worth considering? Or do you base all your decisions on ideology first and rational decision making based on facts second?

Re:A more important reason

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The point wasn't about backwards compatibility. The point is that the source for LibreOffice will still be around. Will you be able to find a version of Office in 2030 that'll open a document created today? Personally, I wouldn't bet on it despite acknowledging the precedent you've described.

I have a question: Would it be possible to open the original app used to make that document back in 91? Would it require a VM?

Re:A more important reason

[dbIII]

Can Open/LIbreOffice open documents from StarOffice 2.0

Of course it can (and I've seen it). Only broken programs fail to import material produced by earlier versions.

Re:A more important reason

[Locutus]

fail! Star Office was proprietary back then and did not use an open standard for its file format.

LoB

Re:A more important reason

[jmottram08]

So . . .uh. . . why wouldn't you bet on it? A precedent has been set, but you choose to think that the open alternative will support more backward compatibility. . . why?

In 20 years youll end up with a bunch of documents in an obsolete format. Congratulations, you have the source code that wrote them. Now all you will have to do is write you own converter.

Re:A more important reason

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

So . . .uh. . . why wouldn't you bet on it? A precedent has been set, but you choose to think that the open alternative will support more backward compatibility. . . why?

Well, for one thing, I'm not just talking about backwards compatibility, I'm talking about being able to open old files in the app they were originally written in. Now, I will concede right now that the latter isn't all that necessary if backwards compatibility is properly maintained and 100%. The only problem I have with 'bettin on it' is that I would genuinely be surprised if by 2030 the equivalent of LibreOffice will be able to properly open a doc I've written in the current version of Word today. I mean, if you follow all the b.s. surrounding reverse-engineerring of the .doc format, and trying to get OSS alternatives to open it, and Microsoft intentionally being a moving target, well personally that gives me pause for thought.

Hmm I'm not sure I'm clearly explaining myself here so I'll try another approach. Here's a few questions I have about the year 2030 and docs I've written today:

- Will Microsoft still be developing Office software in a form that we would find familiar today? (as opposed to going in a wild direction or dropping it altogether because competition has wiped them out?

- If Office 2030 is around, would a document open and look 100% correct? Will all its macros etc still run? (I mainly ask this because it sounds like MS would prefer to use JavaScript now, possibly so docs will work within a browser, too...)

- If Office 2030 isn't around, or if it doesn't properly open the files, will today's versions of Office be around? Will I be able to start them and open the doc through there?

- If Microsoft stopped developing Office, would they release the complete specification of the format?

- Would an alternative app be able to fire up this 20 year old doc and have it come up 100% correct?

In 20 years youll end up with a bunch of documents in an obsolete format. Congratulations, you have the source code that wrote them. Now all you will have to do is write you own converter.

Here's my thinking: Theoretically speaking, LibreOffice and its source code will be around in 2030. Even today's version of it. (Is this a reasonable assumption?) If the document is created in LibreOffice, and it's expected to open in later versions of LibreOffice, hopefully the thousands-of-eyeballs will help keep the compatibility in line. I would also hope that since LibreOffice isn't chasing the almighty dollar, the people working on it wouldn't be so inclined to suddenly change things around in an attempt to appear as though they're really the kings of Office productivity. I figure that even if the backwards compatibility wasn't there, the original version of LO would still be around, capable of properly opening the format, and at least presenting the data the way it was intended. From there we would at least have the source code needed to properly translate into that non-obsolete format.

In short, I wouldn't bet on it because I trust OSS more than Microsoft to maintain data integrity.

Re:A more important reason

[jmottram08]

I hear you, but i guess what it comes down to mainly is that fact that you shouldnt choose a editor today because of predictions set for 30 years from now. Sure, chose a format that balances future accessibility with immediate usability, but dont overestimate how easy format conversions are, both now and in the future. This is a document control issue. . . do we store things in pdf, doc, docx, oo, txt or whatever, but the point is fairly moot, because 1) We dont know anything about what will be using in 30 years, 2) there is a decent chance that whatever it is will have support for a variety of standards, even those that are out of date 3) Long before MS crumbles we will know it, and long after their software will still be able to change formats of documents. 4) the copy of LO will hopefully still be around and accessible, sure, but then again, so will the copy of office 2010.

My bets are that the copy of office 2010 will be easier to get running in 30 years, if needed, than LO once you consider things like java versions and such. Hopefully (probably) they both will be easyish to get running, or emulating, just like win 3.1 is now.

I guess my point is that 30 year forecasts arent that useful or important. For important stuff, it is saved, converted to the newest format every decade or so, then saved again. But if you are going to make the forecast, at least give credit to the company that bends over backwards to maintain compatibility.

Re:A more important reason

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I hear you, but i guess what it comes down to mainly is that fact that you shouldnt choose a editor today because of predictions set for 30 years from now. Sure, chose a format that balances future accessibility with immediate usability, but dont overestimate how easy format conversions are, both now and in the future.

Do you mean for individuals like me or you (or small businesses, etc...), or are we talking in the context of things like medical records where people live for 70+ years? The latter is where I'm coming from, if that helps explain my view. I wouldn't apply that philosophy for my own immediate needs.

Re:A more important reason

[jmottram08]

I mean for businesses and governments.

If you are thinking longer term, 70+ years, and in the medical field especially, you are talking databases, and the upkeep of such are continual, not the "oh no, my word macros dont work quite right"

Re:A more important reason

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Ah.. well, yes, you have a darned good point there.

Re:A more important reason

[Pascal Sartoretti]

Dagens Medicin, a news site for local and regional administrations, quotes Thomsen explaining that most of the hospital workers, doctors and nurses, will have little trouble using Libre Office. "Most of them do not need the advanced features of these suites."

More important than thatt, 20 years from now they'll be able to open the documents they create today.

And even more important : for users of Microsoft Office 2003, Libre Office's GUI is more familiar than Microsoft Office 2007/2010 and its infamous ribbon.

calmly

[G3ckoG33k]

Compare the focus of http://www.godmad.dk/ with http://www.isgodmad.com/ and you'll that the Danish takes thing more calmly.

Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Incoming special discount on Office licenses in 3... 2... 1...

The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[joe 155]

While I think this is good news, I wanted to say, generally, that I think IBM Lotus symphony is far better than other OO.org variants. I'm quite amazed that people don't really seem to consider it. If you've not tried it, you really should. It was also recently donated to the Apache foundation. But the most important think, I think is that it's actually the first office suite I've used in a long time that feels like it offers a compelling alternative to MA office, not only that it is as good where it masters, but that it is actually better in some regards.

I wish they'd get it out as the default in big distros, actually.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[shutdown -p now]

What's good about Symphony? Last I checked, OO version that it is based on has been consistently lagging one major release before the mainline - and therefore all the recent improvements, bugfixes etc are simply not there. Other than weirdish UI, what else does it add?

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[joe 155]

What I like about it is the more modern UI. The tabbed look it has is a metaphor I think a lot of people would get. I also think that the subtle blue colour works well compared to the dated grey-brown that we have in Libre office. The icons also have a nicer look to them, though I don't know if this is just an effect of the generally higher level of polish.

But don't think that these are trivial things. They matter both for how many people will use it, but also for productivity. It's important to have something which works visually too.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[joe 155]

In part yes, it's got the same underlying base anyway, so it's akin to saying that there is something "funny"about wanting a bedroom in a color you like- hey, all room do basicaly the same thing, right?

If I'm going to spend thousands of hours looking at it, you bet I want it to look good.this is what open source software designers need to understand if they want to compete in todays market

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[Ironhandx]

The MS move to the Ribbon was what got my business to switch to OO.o 100% about 3 years ago.

Everyone was much happier with the OO.o interface. Everything is in logical menus and they don't have to go searching through 7 different tabs of buttons to try to find the one pictured, not described, button that MIGHT do what they want it to do, only to realize that the default ribbon doesn't have the button they're looking for shown and they have to add it in manually.

Honestly, there is no worse user experience than the new MSO Ribbon interface. It assumes the user is a 3 year old. Which is great if you're so stupid you shouldn't be touching a computer to begin with, but for the rest of the real working world is a pain in the ass

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[rubycodez]

good god, that phrase about the ribbon says it all. you don't know a horrible, productivity hindering UI when you see one. The reason people like LibreOFfice is that it doesn't have one. The ribbon is garbage, the real people in the real world I know hate it. The only ones who say they like it are a few on Slashdot and some other geek forums.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[dbIII]

Wow. This is like complaining about the lack of sequins on a shovel.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[joe 155]

No, this is merely pointing out that the other big manufacturers of shovels have versions which work, but also have sequins on them, and they outsell this brand by so many to one it's not even funny.

Some people might not care about market share, but to the extent we want big companies tosupport linux, we need them tosupport the office suites we use. For that we need market share, and for that we need a compelling product.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[unencode200x]

The ribbon is collapsible (just press the little up arrow). It hides when you're not using it, just like the old File, Edit, View... menu. I think the reason they leave it visible is so that you get a smoother experience when using the live preview features.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[unencode200x]

Right, the ribbon is just very similar to the traditional drop down menus, except that things have icons next to them. Once you realize that, it's simple and fast to use.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[UnknowingFool]

There are two major problems with the ribbon I have. It takes up a lot of real estate needlessly by using huge icons and it hides many, many functions further into other menus so that it takes many more steps to get to a function. Yes the ribbon can be customized but optimizing it requires some precognition about what functions I'm going to need all the time.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[jvin248]

LOL! "Sequins on a Shovel"

Great Design can have a huge impact on product success. Look at Apple. A bit of nice design and 'marketing like there's no tomorrow', and they are valued more than Exxon. Bad design can drive your customers to the competition .. such was the ribbon design. And how people are much faster at using LO / OOo.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[unencode200x]

Sure, it's definitely not for everyone.

For those that care or need it (it's great for end users), there is a helpful website from Microsoft that let's you do something in Office 2003 and then shows you the steps in Office 2007/2010. It's super easy: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/learn-where-menu-and-toolbar-commands-are-in-office-2010-and-related-products-HA101794130.aspx#_Toc268688374

In my experience just thinking about it like a menu does the trick. Just giving this to end users before an upgrade helps tremendously. People are smart and can pick things up quickly. Good luck!

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[UnknowingFool]

Knowing where the function is isn't my problem. It's where MS has put it. It takes longer than it if was in a simpler drop down menu. I could customize it in the ribbon but then the issue is whether I use a particular function enough to move it and then what I move out.

Re:The other option - IBM Lotus symphony

[Suddenly_Dead]

Since we don't have a private message feature (someone will probably off-topic mod this if they can manage to browse this far through Slashdot's ever-more-broken commenting system)...

Canadian chiropractors asked about which non-back pain-related illnesses they thought they could treat with chiropractic. You can thank me another time.

Re:They are in for a suprise

[lucidlyTwisted]

A new cost saving deal will done the new staff and US exports will be safe again.

I think that's what happened in Germany, when their foreign office dropped Linux. It was working rather well, but words were had and the experiment dropped.
(There was also a political shift to a party that favoured the profits of their friends in business over the costs borne by the people).

This is far more important that it seems:

[Hymer]

Denmark is very Microsoft oriented, our former prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen even visited Steve Ballmer in Redmond.
A move away from Microsoft product is very hard, the usual management argument is either: "Worlds biggest software company surely must have the best product!" or "Worlds most sold Office package must be best!" combined with the fact that nearly every business uses either Dynamics AXA or Dynamics NAV (or some former versions of those two) makes any changes next to impossible.
This is btw. second big move away from MS Office in the health sector, "Region Midtjylland" did this a couple of years ago. Several municipalities has also moved either everything or just the education.

Re:This is far more important that it seems:

[Inf0phreak]

"ooh I know this" — was it a Unix system? ;-)

Re:This is far more important that it seems:

[Hymer]

Actually, we're also putting LibreOffice on all public machines in Copenhagen.....

Who are we ? RH or KK ?

LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice (seriously)

[Compaqt]

What's really the actual difference for an office worker?

Granted, on Ubuntu going forward, I guess it's going to be Libre. But what if you're downloading it for Windows?

And should you or should you not get the version with Java?

Re:LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice (seriously)

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice has been actively improving since the fork, and has the full set of distribution infrastructure for Windows and Linux, where as OpenOffice has not, and does not have either yet. For a windows user the most important bits are that the insane start up time has been reduced,and the improvements to the Microsoft docx type documents, but there are many other improvements, to pivot tables in calc for example. Due to the nature of the apache foundation they will have to rip out all the non apache licensed bits and replace them before they can start, this will take a while. I am not sure whether they even have it building properly yet, but even when they do, they will find themselves over half a year (or more) behind LibreOffice, from a cold start and without the support of the Linux distributors.

Re:LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice (seriously)

[Gaygirlie]

The most notable thing is that LibreOffice has more momentum than OpenOffice, and that translates to better support and likely faster bugfixes and feature improvements. For someone who needs an office suite for actual work good support and timely bugfixes are probably among the most important features.

Re:They are in for a suprise

[Bert64]

Have you ever tried using "business software", especially from a large vendor? Most of it is pretty crap and the employees hate it, but they don't get a choice and are forced to use it.

It isn't.

[munch117]

If they were all using MS Office, I'm sure they wouldn't mind paying for it. No, the problem is that they'd have to pay as if everyone was using MS Office, because virtualisation and commercial licensing don't play ball.

From computerworld.dk, my translation:

The cause of the extra licensing costs are according to Vivian Thomsen in Microsoft's licensing policy. She explains that if just one single VDI user among the 25,000 clinicians has access to Microsoft Office, that will trigger Office license payment for every single computer/client with access to the virtual desktop environment View from VMware.

Re:It isn't.

[jimicus]

If they were all using MS Office, I'm sure they wouldn't mind paying for it. No, the problem is that they'd have to pay as if everyone was using MS Office, because virtualisation and commercial licensing don't play ball.

Funny, that sounds like exactly the sort of clause that is strictly non-negotiable until you're a big enough organisation and you inform the press that you're moving the lot over to a F/OSS alternative.

Re:Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

It has not crashed on me, and I use references regularly, for the TLDR crowd, he links a blog post that complains about problems which are in the proses of being solved, or have been solved since the post was written, as if they where not planed or already in progress when the post was made.

lets summarize the things you are wining about there
            -- Support for MS Office XML file formats. - improving, if slower than I would like Microsoft modified the format for a reason, if it was easy to reverse engineer that would spoil the point
            -- Support for SVG import and export - done
            -- Java removal - in progress (java based wizard replacement for next major version)
            -- Multi-monitor support - improving, bundled plug-ins to handle power-point style presenter mode for you
            -- SQLIte for the main database engine - planed as part of the java removal to start very soon (now the wizards have been replaced)
            -- Finish the Bibliography tool. - I never used Microsoft's one so why should I use LiberOffice's Zotaro is ideal for my needs as a PHD student and is open source so this is not even a problem
 

Re:Too bad....

[Dr_Barnowl]

It's not that completely different - It's pretty obvious from the MOO-XML standards that the MS Office .***x formats are just an XML serialization of the existing binary formats. This does make it sufficiently similar to ODF to fool the technically naive though - hey, they're both a ZIP file full of XML, right?

The real "open" part of ODF is clarity. MOO-XML is 6000 pages long and extremely unclear. ODF is sufficiently clear that there are at least 2 open-source implementations of it.

Re:LibreOffice

[lucidlyTwisted]

I think you'll find that "GIMP" is far, far worse.

Doesn't matter!

[Snaller]

Nobody can read what the doctors are writing in shorthand as it is - using computer letters on a screen is only going to improve it! ;)

Re:Cue a deluge of phone calls from

[Locutus]

phone calls? In this economy the threat of OSS is even greater for Microsoft so I would think the Microsoft MiB will be showing up on their doorstep.

LoB

Terminal Server (RDS) Licensing

[unencode200x]

If you RTFA the real problem was that these guys are switching to terminal servers (it doesn't say which technology, but one can safely assume it's Microsoft-based so probably Remote Desktop Services, possibly with Citrix). Anyway, the problem that they had is that if they only had say 500 people who needed to use Office, they would have to have paid for all 25,000 users because those users because Microsoft Office is licensed on a per device model (there is no per user licensing anymore). That is you have to have a license for Office for every device that Office might be accessed from. There are probably a few loopholes around this, but I'm not aware of any. They can, of course, continue to use their existing Office licenses or buy OEM/Retail/volume for their PCs or laptops.

I don't think you get the point

[F69631]

If a computer-literate person can fuck up installing a piece of office software with just the basic modules, even after several tries and even on a fresh install of the OS, something is wrong with the software. A bug is a bug even if most of the people who use the software never encounter it. When someone explains problems they've had using the software, answering "Well, it works well for most of the userbase, so you just suck" is idiotic.

Next time, at least remember to click the "Post Anonymously" checkbox before spilling that kind of garbage.

Re:I don't think you get the point

[F69631]

Why do you assume computer literacy?

c.r.o.c.o wanted to use Open Office in the first place, he demonstrated knowledge of the common troubleshooting steps (running as administrator, changing permissions, tried different dictionary versions and even reinstalled [the newest version] of Windows)... If that level of skill isn't enough to operate a piece of office software, 90% of the target audience can't use it. So, we can reasonably establish that he is computer-literate enough that he should be able to use OO.org, don't you think? That is before checking his posting history (which appears to contain discussions about android mods and the like).

why do you assume the software has flaw?

When a person who knows enough about computers (as established above) really wants to use a piece of software and goes through a lot of trouble to make that happen but is unable to... something, somewhere is wrong. If you even can fuck something like this up when installing the software, something is wrong, but I don't think you can. So it must be a flaw.

I'm not going to post anonymous just because I point out uncomfortable truth.

But you don't do that. You really don't. :)

No one has that problem with LibreOffice of people I know, and that is dozens.

Really? Would they all tell you if they had? OO.org has numerous open bugs, some have been open for 8 years. Have dozens of people told you about how frustrated they are with each of those? Either they don't encounter all the bugs that are demonstrably there, or they don't report them all to you. In both cases, your anecdote is completely meaningless.

A minute tail end of the bell curve means nothing, except the tail has a problem. Tails don't wag the dog.

That's entirely different issue. That's no more about your original point of "If I and some of my friends don't encounter this bug, it doesn't exist and you've just fucked up" and more of "If only a small percentage of users encounter the bug, it doesn't need to be fixed", which is still silly. At least one person has already answered to the guy and said that he has encountered the same problem and offered one workaround. Now that I think of it, I actually might have run into this (or at least, some OO.org spellchecking trouble) myself but I'm not sure and really, it doesn't even matter. There is clearly some problem with the software and it clearly causes some people trouble so a kneejerk reaction to it is stupid.

Re:Too bad....

[UnknowingFool]

I haven't read any recent specifications but the original ones seemed rushed and incomplete. Many parts of it merely referred to proprietary MS functions never explained like "tabWithLayoutLikeWord95".

General computer illiteracy

[kuiperbelt]

Just as most people are unaware of widespread keyboard shortcuts, think the blue 'e' is the Internet, and confuse RAM with hard disk space (emptying the recycle bin if their computers slow down with a bazillion browser tabs open), so are most users ignorant of text files and text editors and believe that if you want to write something down, you need a word processor.

This is the mentality that leads to people sending out emails with subject lines like "PLEASE READ", body text consisting of something like "See attached" and the actual content in a bloated and superfluous .docx file. Someone very intelligent known to me who I managed to get using Kubuntu following a Windows spyware infection routinely fires up LibreOffice to jot down phone numbers, and is puzzled by "this weird text thing" that I prefer to use for everything that doesn't require presentational formatting.

The only formal education in computing I received at school consisted of things like how to make words underlined in, you guessed it, Microsoft Word, so it is no wonder the average hospital employee believes they need expensive proprietary software to perform trivial computing tasks.

Re:Cue a deluge of phone calls from

[jmottram08]

Cue a deluge of phone calls from. . . the people that now have to use a buggy office suite instead of one that isnt.

Re:"Scumbag hospitals" ...

[RazorSharp]

Just by using it they're supporting it. They bring legitimacy to LibreOffice that OOo's been trying to achieve since its inception. All those managers who scoffed at the idea of using non-MS Office software because "it's not Microsoft, and in business everyone uses Microsoft" will take pause. When they need to trim the budget, they may remember reading some story about saving millions by going with LibreOffice. They may talk about it with their golf buddies.

Every large business that relies on LibreOffice is one less large business paying an unnecessary tax to Microsoft for software functionality that is extremely dated. Office is one of the most overpriced pieces of software on the market and it maintains that price by leveraging compatibility and this perception that a business has to use Microsoft to be taken seriously. OOo and its forks are taking care of the compatibility with OpenDocument and support for Word -- it's businesses that take the plunge and actually use the software that will take care of the perception problem. So just by using the software, they're supporting it. Doing so publicly supports FOSS even more.

Re:Symphony is NOT based on OO

[shutdown -p now]

The UI in Symphony is indeed based on Eclipse, but the actual editing area is based on OO code. IBM said regarding Symphony 3.0:

This version is based on the current OpenOffice.org 3 codebase

You don't know it might have been Word Perfect!

[madhi19]

That still around and some peoples still swear by it. Considering how fast large organisation move they might have still been using old desktop from the 90s until recently anyway.

Re:Cue a deluge of phone calls from

[Hymer]

phone calls? In this economy the threat of OSS is even greater for Microsoft so I would think the Microsoft MiB will be showing up on their doorstep.

LoB

Microsoft has already officially said (regarding this specific case) that their pricing policy is fair and they do not plan to make any changes.

Re:Cue a deluge of phone calls from

[Locutus]

because their public statements are always what _really_ happens. sure.

LoB