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."
Re:About fucking time! (Score:4, Insightful)
If a 10-day change is "slow as molasses" then I'd like to see what happens when they react quickly to something!
Implications (Score:4, Insightful)
As well, as a Mac user myself, and for others using non-MS systems, it will be nice to be able to tell people that IBM uses OpenOffice.org (which will be the shortcut way of telling them that they are using an in-house customized version...) as an incentive / emotional proof that OOo is viable for their own use.
Re:Just another feabile attempt (Score:3, Insightful)
And software isn't worse just because it's free.
Re:Heh, some things never change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess what... most folks still used Office instead.
Not in my department. How on earth did "most folks" get an Office license from the IBM beancounters?
Facts wrong again (Score:2, Insightful)
I just have a hard time taking /. seriously. Oracle is buying Sun. IBM isn't.
How the hell are we supposed to trust this source for any news when it's always wrong.
Re:Whooopeeeee (Score:2, Insightful)
The important part is that it uses the same files as OpenOffice and is fully compatible.
To Microsoft, their proprietary formats are the most valuable part of the office suite, it's where there control stems from.
There is a LOT that uses MS Office (Score:4, Insightful)
It rather annoys and even pisses me off that so many important business tools are written with dependencies on MS Office. That is, of course, Microsoft's intention and the primary reason for the existence of a programming language built into the office suite.
I once worked for a firm where a contract writing program that requires MS Office and, if I recall correctly, Adobe Acrobat Professional. What a huge waste of money!? Not only was this "application" quite expensive, but so are the dependencies involved... and on top of that, the application was only valid for a year. Upon learning about this situation, I had two thoughts. One was related to the old saying about a fool and his money, and the other was that my hopes of saving the company any money by going to OO.o was a lot more challenging.
Using more F/OSS in business requires that people are mindful of the applications and the dependencies [lock-in] that they bring. Moving away from commercial and proprietary isn't as simple as replacing one app with another. There are often deeper considerations.
The danger of lock-in isn't usually apparent or obvious to people who buy apps. Quite often IT isn't even involved in that decision.
Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office (Score:4, Insightful)
That is, of course, Microsoft's intention and the primary reason for the existence of a programming language built into the office suite.
If your contention is that VBA isnt useful, then explain the billions of lines of VBA code in the world. Integration with the suite is just one of the things that makes the alternatives like Open Office non-competitive. Your idea that VBA is just there as a lock-in is silly.
To translate your argument to reality: "Features that customers use extensively, when the competition doesnt have them, is only a lock-in"
Re:In my dreams (Score:3, Insightful)
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.z/quote>
I think you're comparing apples to oranges here, with sound or still images or video I don't really care how it's stored as such only that it decodes to uncompressed audio/video frames. It is the decoded version, the simplest of structures, that is the universal intermediary. With documents the whole point is in preserving and manipulating the markup, what it renders to as a screenshot is completely irrelevant. That means to convert from say MS Office to OpenOffice you have to map the content, layout, every setting, every function, every formula, everything. You need to have exact specifications on both formats and things must mean the same, That is completely and utterly the opposite of the examples you make.
P.S. You're horribly, horribly wrong about vector graphics.
Re:Just another feabile attempt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whooopeeeee (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:1/3 of a million employees (Score:3, Insightful)
Very true. Forcing a company to eat their own food could certainly benefit all of us who use it.
Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office (Score:4, Insightful)
My contention is that the reality of the presence of VBA is not necessary for an office suite. It never has been and never will be. Various external APIs say so.
I don't say it isn't useful -- don't be so defensive. But it is a problem in that VBA applications are a great deal more costly because they are not stand-alone and as a result, the user has to buy other things in order to use the application they want to use.
Customers do not often use VBA. Customers use applications that use VBA.
VBA is actually a dangerous thing as it takes an ordinarily trustworthy document and transforms it into a potential carrier for malware infection. It has been done before and continues to be done. There are certain things that shouldn't be done and including a programming language as low and as powerful as VBA gives even entry-level script-kiddies the ability to cause major problems. VBA is bad just as Active-X is bad.
The reasons that other office suites do not provide similar functionality isn't because they "can't." It's because they know they shouldn't. People who care about security and the like concern themselves with the limitations they can provide in order to protect the users. VBA (and Active-X) grant user level access to the machine and quite often require administrator level access which users have been shown more than willing to grant. (This is irrelevant since there are known exploits that cannot be patched in Win32 without breaking every application ever written that enables privilege escalation)
The purpose of VBA is to take an office applications suite and convert it into an operating platform.
If it is somehow appropriate for documents to carry executable code, then why not pictures, sounds and video? Should email carry executable code? Is it appropriate for web pages to carry executable code that isn't sandboxed and limited? From where I sit, for the same reasons all the other common file types shouldn't contain executable code, office documents shouldn't.
Re:In my dreams (Score:5, Insightful)
[...] far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats [...] sound, still images, vector graphics, even video [...]
Text is far more complicated than any of these, with vector graphics being the most complicated left, IMHO. Sound, raster graphics, and video are just arrays with a fixed data type. There are other data fields, of course, but they are vastly less important. A rich text document, on the other hand, may have to deal with concepts like page layout, paragraph options, text options, text positioning, hierarchical styling, embedded objects, and everyone's favorite embedded scripts. That's why all off their files look like two or more markup languages are colliding in a spectacular explosion. That is if you are lucky and they are not, on top of all that, compressed binaries.
Re:Just another feabile attempt (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, it's worse when it has fewer features, fewer developments, and fewer compatibilities. It's worse when it doesn't have in-roads into the given user's industry practices too.
All I'm saying is that OOo is late-to-the-game, and simply isn't quite as advanced yet. They've got a long way to go, and others have had a substantive head-start.
Now why would I support a lesser product? Why would I support a late-comer? Why would I risk my hard-earned business on a product that simply isn't as mature yet?
There's one reason -- it saves me money. That becomes a value proposition. Value propositions are straight-forward business decisions. Those are easy.
Re:In my dreams (Score:3, Insightful)
[...] far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats [...] sound, still images, vector graphics, even video [...]
Text is far more complicated than any of these, with vector graphics being the most complicated left, IMHO. Sound, raster graphics, and video are
just arrays with a fixed data type. There are other data fields, of course, but they are vastly less important. A rich text document, on the other hand,
may have to deal with concepts like page layout, paragraph options, text options, text positioning, hierarchical styling, embedded objects, and everyone's favorite embedded scripts. That's why all off their files look like two or more markup languages are colliding in a spectacular explosion. That is if you are lucky and they are not, on top of all that, compressed binaries.
Embedded scripts should be nixed for the security concerns alone. If you need to send someone a script, send them a script, not an MS Word document.
Excel (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the money I spent for Microsoft Excel has been worth every penny. There's just simply no comparison, and I find it amazing that all of IBM would be willing to abandon it completely, regardless of cost.
Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people who use Windows use XP. Bad argument and you probably already know that. You probably also knew about the message queue vulnerability... didn't you? A professional would know. And I wouldn't be too sure that 32 bit Vista or 7 could effectively patch the problem without changing the Win32 message queue and breaking compatibility. Do you have any references to cite this achievement? Preferably one that explains why it isn't fixed in WindowsXP.
I've read through your comment history a bit. You might as well add a signature that says "I'm a Microsoft shill."
Re:In my dreams (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding? Still images are ridiculously easy to standardize the encoding of. And even then once you get slightly more complicated such as PSD the standard and the implementation becomes more and more difficult.
On the video front you have 'standards' such as OMF or AAF that rarely actually work perfectly.
In 3D we have Collada and FBX. Neither of which adequately describe a full 3D scene completely yet.
A text document is a very complicated file with the potential for an enormous amount of bizzare formatting and embedded data. None of the XML based standards are simple or small. They're just varying levels of complex. I would say a document standard is representing far more complex data than video but less complex than 3D scenes.
Re:Heh, some things never change... (Score:1, Insightful)
For quite a while (maybe the last 8 or 10 years), all laptops have come with Office installed, or it could be installed with the corporate license from ISSI (IBM Standard Software Install). For a while (maybe 3-5 years) many people had Office and SmartSuite installed side by side. It was quite common to find content (primarily presentations) that was in teamrooms or sent from upper level management, in SmartSuite format. It was also (weirdly) quite common to get patent drafts back from attorneys in SmartSuite format. However, SmartSuite content has now almost completely faded away (except for some old stuff lying around).
So, now we will (eventually) migrate to something different. I haven't used OO except for a few quick glances. My suspicion is that anyone who writes a paper for a conference and then has to use the conference's format template, or anyone who works on a standards committee, will just end up taking a lot of work home so they can use real Office applications.
Having been with IBM for over 25 years, I can say that we're never supplied with what we want, and we're often not supplied with what we need, but we're resourceful, and no matter how much the execs cut costs, we find a way to get the work done.
(By the way, if an IBM exec says "we're not doing this to save money", that's when you know that they're doing it to save money.)
Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office (Score:3, Insightful)
HINT: The real world doesn't run Vista or Windows 7 in a business environment. The ones who run Windows tend to run XP, which is a sieve security-wise. The latest unpatchable exploits are just another demonstration of the lack of security focus at Microsoft, which if you've been around long at all you must recognize as a pattern.
As for the "shill" comment -- considering your comment history, one has to wonder if you are being paid for your comments, as they fly in the face of reality as we know it. Of course the possibility is that you're some Best Buy or Office Depot employee playing "security engineer" on the weekends. In either event, I pity you.
Re:Heh, some things never change... (Score:3, Insightful)
They got assigned IBM PC machines that came pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Up until MS-Office 2007 the license key was included on pre-installed PCs. IBM had a license with Microsoft to pre-load MS-Windows on their brand PCs and Laptops (Lenovo in modern times IIRC).
Sometime around 1999 IBM stopped pre-loading Lotus Smartsuite and was forced by Microsoft to pre-load MS-Office or lose their OEM status. More modern versions of Microsoft Windows break Lotus Smartsuite compatibilities by the way, which is why people like me had to abandon it. I am glad that IBM Lotus Symphony can work with MS-Office and IBM Lotus Smartsuite files as well as OO.o and ODF file formats. If it has a decent spell check and grammar check I may even stop using MS-Office XP (2002) and convert over to IBM Lotus Symphony.
Re:In my dreams (Score:5, Insightful)
>Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.
I've published two books in LaTeX and will sing its praises for hours, but it cannot sanely be called simple or easy to use.
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In my dreams (Score:3, Insightful)
[cough] LaTeX [cough]
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just another feabile attempt (Score:3, Insightful)
Rockoon wrote:
I think a more important question is: Does OpenOffice.org meet the needs of the user? If OpenOffice.org meets the needs of the user, why not choose it over MS Office?
Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Insightful)
What do we care?
They may use OO.o, their own version branded Symphony, or what-ever.
The real point here is what EVERYBODY misses and that is that they are mandating saving in Open Document Format. That's what's important. They are a major company and they are now supporting an open format, which has by now maybe a dozen word processors supporting it.
For what I am concerned they continue using MS Word in half of their business, and save the documents in ODF. Then people who have some special needs can take their special-needs-word processor and have no problems with compatibility. Linux/Mac users are also happy. Maybe there are Solaris users around even - they will be happy not having to boot Windows just to read an e-mail attachment.
Remember folks, it's the use of open standards that counts. Not the actual implementation - as long as that implementation is correct and follows the standard well, I'm happy. MS Word's lock-in with its doc format is the problem, not MS Word as such.
Re:Implications (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft Bob reborn? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess they felt they should get something from the acquisition of Lotus Symphony so that's what they call their version of OpenOffice. Perhaps Microsoft should offer their own version of OO and call it "Microsoft Bob".
Don't you mean "Microsoft BOO.ob"
Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:3, Insightful)
I love my Lotus stuff. Lotus 1-2-3 is still my favorite spreadsheet of all time, and WordPro is an excellent word processor. It has enough bells and whistles to do everything I want to do without trying to wipe my nose for me (i.e. popping up a stupid paper clip while I'm trying to work). EARLY versions of Lotus Notes had some glitches, but the last few releases have been awesome. I think Notes and Domino get a bad name because of all the capabilities. From a sys-admin point of view, it might be a challenge, but once you're set up, the tools can be really powerful.