IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o 331
Posted
by
timothy
from the let's-see-some-school-districts-do-the-same dept.
from the let's-see-some-school-districts-do-the-same dept.
eldavojohn writes "It's frequent that we hear of a country or city or company switching from Windows to Linux, but it's rare that we hear of one third of a million employees being told to use Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) over MS Office, and also to use the Open Document Format when saving files. The change has been mandated to take place in the next 10 days. Of course, they are doing this to illustrate that they actually offer a full-fledged alternative to Microsoft. With i4i stirring stuff up against MS Office and absolving OO.o from litigation, are we on the verge of a potential break from Microsoft's dominant document suite? Hopefully IBM supports OO.o past Sun's acquisition by Oracle instead of concentrating on Lotus Symphony."
Wait. What? (Score:2, Informative)
". . . past their acquisition of Sun . . ."
I think someone's been misreading recent headlines.
Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Informative)
IBM discontinued the original Symphony suite in 1992, but revived the name in 2007 for their OO.o variant. Apart from being an office suite from IBM, it's not related to the 1980s/early-90s Symphony.
Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Informative)
Err, correction--- Lotus discontinued the Lotus Symphony suite in 1992, a few years before being bought by IBM in 1995. When IBM bought Lotus (mainly to get Lotus Notes), they also got all the trademarks, and I guess a decade later decided to resurrect one of them. Either way, the current Symphony isn't code-wise related to the old one.
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Informative)
According to the summary Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.
... Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) ...
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Informative)
It actually uses Eclipse for the GUI and OpenOffice for opening/saving/formatting/displaying documents
Re:In my dreams (Score:5, Informative)
> Because we all have different ideas of what the perfect word processor will be, this is one step closer to a happy software world.
Exactly. Most other data types standardized on one or a handful of formats long ago, it was the Microsoft monopoly that distorted things with formatted text and spreadsheets. Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video! All interoperable. Meanwhile Word docs aren't even certain to be compatible between two different installs of the same version of Word. Buy a new printer and connect it to the same install and previous docs will often need to be reformatted. Good riddence to that!
Oh, and IBM didn't buy Sun; Oracle bought the corpse to loot it.
Re:WordPro? (Score:1, Informative)
How to read Lotus Word Pro:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WordProConverter.htm
Re:In my dreams (Score:4, Informative)
Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.
But what OO.o does do is provide a more liberated document format for businesses and other organisations around the world to interchange documents with, and to implement document management and other business processes around. That's a big enough thing in its own right, albeit nothing but an internationalised return to the status that we had years ago with ASCII.
Heh, some things never change... (Score:5, Informative)
I used be an IBM employee, and I can remember the corporate mandate that ALL IBM internal documents had to be made in Lotus SmartSuite instead of Microsoft Office. Guess what... most folks still used Office instead. The primary reason was that SmartSuite sucked, and was about five years behind Office in terms of ease of use and functionality. IBM never bothered to regularly update it as well, leaving it in some 1997-era timewarp when the rest of the world was using Office 2003.
I haven't tried Lotus Symphony myself, but if it's anything like OpenOffice 3, I doubt that most IBM'ers will be raring to convert all of their documents over in a timely manner. Combine that with thousands of customer facing workers that NEED to use Microsoft Office to ensure total compatibility, and you're going to have a hell of a time getting everyone to switch.
Re:About fucking time! (Score:5, Informative)
For IBM to mandate the use of this package is, truthfully, making official what has already been regular practice for quite some time.
Re:Implications (Score:3, Informative)
This goes far beyond IBM's employees. Many other large organizations are strongly influenced by IBM still. In my work as a process improvement consultant, I have seen many people using the Lotus environment, particularly in financial institutions. Does this mean that they too will start using ODF?
If they use Lotus Symphony, they are using ODF already! [ibm.com]
A Bit Misleading (Score:4, Informative)
A bit of a disclaimer here: I work for IBM.
With that said, the change wasn't as much as an ideological shift to OO software more than it was a licensing issue. The simple fact was that it is quite expensive for MS Office licenses for the entire company. Lotus Symphony has been available to employees for years, but it hasn't really been forced until three or so months ago when a program was pushed to workstations that removed MS Office and installed the Symphony suite if you did not already have it(default builds come with Symphony on it anyway, so it didn't really need to be installed on many workstations). Now if you want a copy of MS Office on your IBM workstation, you have to have a legitimate business need to order it or you can use your own personal copy if you so choose. There are hardly any instances of the former case happening.
It was stated before by another thread here by an ex IBMer that SmartSuite was the default for IBM documents and that people used Office anyway. Yes, that is true. The reason that is true is that Office had become the defacto standard across other industries, and that IBM offered it to employees for free on their workstations, so it was the logical choice to make. Couple that with the fact that SmartSuite was not nearly as developed as Symphony was a few years ago, people couldn't be hassled with converting between file formats, or sending files to other employees or clients and pray that the recipient could actually open it. SmartSuite was a boon on productivity and hence the broader use of Office within the company.
Now IBM is in the market for software. As was stated earlier, the best place to start promoting your own product is from within. In all honesty, a LOT of employees never used Symphony simply because no one knew it existed, and if they did, they did not have the time to learn it. Now that IBM has shifted away from Office for internal uses, our customers may see this and may want to investigate -- that's the theory at least.
The article is a bit misleading in that Symphony is an OO.o variant. Here's a hint: it's not in no more than a humvee is a variant of a boat. The real only similarity is that they both use open standards as their default file types. With that said, however, Symphony still supports MS Office formats and many people DO switch to using those formats as the default anyway. Having said that, there is not much of an uproar as one may think about this switch. Symphony supports both open standards and Office standards, which is the best of both worlds for us.
I guess the bottom line is that this was a BUSINESS decision and not one further the development of open standards. IBM is a business and the business will do what is in its own interest to stay in business. I'm sure it is saving us lots of money, and to be honest I thought this sort of change would be forced down years ago. Either way, it gets the word out on Symphony and gets us off office which saves money. It's the best of both worlds, no?
Re:About fucking time! (Score:5, Informative)
Document formats... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Informative)
Other than some addons (fonts, templates), there are two primary advantages that Symphony and StarOffice (Sun's commercial offering of OOo [1]) have over the open source version, and for most individuals, they are not that big a deal.
The first is commercial support. If a business has some problem (usage, program issue), an office suite is a core to productivity. Having support for both questions and in case of something happeninging is vital.
The second is legal CYA. If a business is using a commercial product and something happens, they can just point at their support contracts, and tell people to go blame the vendor. Without this, if an incident happens (leakage of information, mass data loss), there is no "due diligence", and the buck will stop with the company, opening them up to civil lawsuits and criminal investigation, especially if under laws like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or other regulations.
[1]: Technically Openoffice.org came from StarOffice.
Re:About fucking time! (Score:3, Informative)
But you raise an interesting point: Research was the single IBM division with which I was unable to involve myself (and to this day continue to try and get my foot into, so if you have any contacts I'm honestly interested
Re:About fucking time! (Score:5, Informative)
As a ten-year employee, I can say without equivocation that you don't have a fricken clue how large IBM is. Your department may have used Symphony. My department is still stuck with custom programs written in 1-2-3, and does at least 95% of its work in Word and Excel (including more custom programming). I have never seen a single ODF file cross my desk, on any project, for any customer.
IBM mandates lots of stuff internally that doesn't necessarily matter. And if you wait a a few weeks, they'll reorg and change their mind.
Re:OpenOffice variant? Shades of the infobox (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:2, Informative)
10 days? (Score:1, Informative)
WE were given a lot more than 10 days. I've been using Symphony for at least six months, after a email came down telling us to switch over. I have not yet received any emails giving me just 10 days. Of course, I still have to keep MS Office installed because of the occasional PowerPoint presentation that makes its way to me.