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Closing the Office door on Microsoft | |
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| Time: 09:36 EST/14:36 GMT | News Source: TechRepublic | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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Because OpenOffice is free and you have to pay a substantial fee for Microsoft Office, you might be tempted to migrate your entire organisation from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. After all, migrating to OpenOffice would save an absolute fortune in Microsoft Office licenses, which is important in a time of shrinking IT budgets. Before you jump right in and begin a migration, though, there are a few issues that you need to be aware of. | ||
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| #1 By 9589 (66.57.145.91) at 6/15/2004 10:28:56 AM |
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An anti OSS product article? Say it isn't so! lol
This ought to fire up the OSS zealots on this site! |
| #2 By 6859 (206.156.242.36) at 6/15/2004 11:29:47 AM |
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For us, the worst two things about OO.org is that there is not Outlook replacement in it and you have to completely redo all the macros.
Were it not for those two things, OO.org would be a MAJOR threat to MS Office. I keep hoping they impliment those changes, but I have a feeling MS would poo a brick on that. Sadly, those are the show stoppers for real widespread adoption and replacement. Other than that, OO.org is actually the single best open project to date. I don't know why anyone else even tries to compete. |
| #3 By 860 (204.232.11.1) at 6/15/2004 11:46:54 AM |
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#5: No need for OO to write an Outlook replacement. There is Ximian's Evolution, which is a good Outlook replacement. Since Novell released the Ximian Connector under GPL, I use Ximian Evolution to talk to our company's Exchange server... both at the office and at home, which makes it function just like Outlook even from a remote location. It's pretty nice.
In other news... this ad that loaded on the left sidebar here... Hit Agent Smith... keeps flashing and is going to cause me to put my foot THROUGH THE MONITOR OH DEAR GOD THIS AD IS F*&$#ING ANNOYING PLEASE SOMEONE KILL THESE ADS! |
| #4 By 6859 (206.156.242.36) at 6/15/2004 12:06:14 PM |
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#6, Ximian Evolution only runs on Linux as far as I know (I haven't used it.) If OO.org were to script an Outlook replacement that ran on Windows...that would be something.
And who needs a replacement for Publisher? So that can be ignored. |
| #5 By 37 (67.37.29.142) at 6/15/2004 12:17:06 PM |
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Well, to debunk all these Ximian comments to replace Outlook, how is that possible when Evolution is designed to run on platforms OTHER than Windows?
Evolution is supported on the following distributions: SUSE LINUX 9.0 SUSE LINUX 8.2 SUSE LINUX Desktop 1.0 Red Hat Linux 9.0 Red Hat Linux 8.0 (see note below) Red Hat Linux 7.3 (see note below) Linux Mandrake 9.1 Sun Solaris 8 (SPARC)(requires Sun GNOME 2) So that is pretty much useless. #1 By Halcyon-X12 (792 Posts) at 6/15/2004 9:54:11 AM [Delete | Nullify] Wrote: >I find this article's arguments pretty weak. It was actually a good article, but had a dead end conclusion >you need to be aware that with OpenOffice, you get what you pay for >It is clearly biased, saying OpenOffice is good for nothing? They didn't say it was good for nothing. I read that as being a good product for free, but not worth paying for. >technical support is pretty much limited to whatever information you can find on the Internet. >If you want support you can pay Sun for it, it's a lot cheaper than OpenOffice. They are talking about OO, not Star. For Sun, you have to pay for the OS. And for Sun, they give users more filters for improved MS Office conversions (which is still pathetic at best) >Chances are if you're migrating then you have enough experience on MS Office already to >know what you're doing in OpenOffice, is support really an issue? Support is the number issue for consumers/retailers/corporations buying software. >For home use, people tend to never call tech support but rather ask others for help, and >others rely on others, etc, until you get to a geek who's figured it out for themselves. Wrong. As a support person, it is my finding that home users USE tech support frequently for MS products as well as any other product. >No home user usually calls MS for support, and for office users, they can pay Sun for support >for OpenOffice or they can migrate to StarOffice which has support contracts as well, if they >are looking for an inexpensive alternative. The article is about OO, not Sun. But, the migration would be a disaster in a small business or corporate environment. The typical secretary might not have an issue with the coversion, since all they are going to be converting over are simple letters and spreadsheets. An inexpensive alternative would be to use Microsoft Works/Microsoft Works Suite, which is far better than OO. >The most notable example is that there is no OpenOffice version of Microsoft Outlook. This is true. >but perhaps you would be better without Outlook and try Ximian Evolution or something >similar AFAIK, that is a linux only platform application. Useless. >Or can you buy Outlook seperately? Yes you can. >Even so, the missing features can make converting Microsoft Office documents to OpenOffice >format difficult. For example, in Microsoft Office, macros are encoded in Visual Basic Script. >However, OpenOffice doesn't support Visual Basic script. However, it does offer a scripting language. That doesn't help in a migration. This would require people to rewrite millions and millions lines of code in millions and millions of docs or spreadsheets. In time and labor, that would be in the $BILLIONS. >MS Office also doesn't offer support for >OpenOffice documents Why should it? It was OO choice to enter a market dominated by Office by about 97%. If they want to me competitive and be compatible, it is them they need to work on better migration tools, not Microsoft. >But what VB scripts are in common documents that don't have macros that aren't viruses? there are millions and millions. |
| #6 By 37 (67.37.29.142) at 6/15/2004 12:21:29 PM |
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#7 By Cthulhu (547 Posts) at 6/15/2004 12:06:14 PM [Delete | Nullify] wrote:
"And who needs a replacement for Publisher? So that can be ignored. " True. There are already millions of Publisher 2003 users out there that are happy and content with their product. There is no need for an alternative. |
| #7 By 135 (208.186.90.168) at 6/16/2004 1:02:14 AM |
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Do you realize how hard it is to leash train a cat?
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| #8 By 19992 (164.214.4.61) at 6/17/2004 9:21:55 AM |
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OpenOffice is great for your 'average home user'. It beats pirating MS Office and gives you most (all?) of the functionality you will need.
Business use is another matter. Most companies are probably better off sticking with MS Office until OpenOffice has a chance to grow some more. |
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