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Comments: 331 +- IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o on Sunday September 13, @03:39PM
Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday September 13, @03:39PM
from the let's-see-some-school-districts-do-the-same dept.
from the let's-see-some-school-districts-do-the-same dept.
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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."
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About fucking time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Previously, the used MS Office but actually recommended their customers to use Symphony. That's just a laughable position.
I'm glad the finally changed this, but i'm not sure if this actually means anything. IBM's slow as molasses in regards to everything. Want a server from them? Better wait 4-6 weeks.
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!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I tend to agree with the GP. IBM are an absolutely typical conservative company. IMO, if they're dictating everything change within 10 days this has probably been brewing internally for the better part of a year or more.
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.
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Re:About fucking time! (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, all the IBM sales reps i've dealt with had to purchase Office 2007 through their expense account, because IBM wouldn't buy a volume license.
None of them used Symphony. All the stuff up on PartnerWorld is in .ppt too, created by PowerPoint.
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Re:About fucking time! (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Ooo's (Score:5, Funny)
Peter: Oh my God, Brian, there's a message in my alphabets... it says Ooooo!
Brian: Peter those are Cheerios.
Sound Clip [entertonement.com]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, at first I thought Oo.o is the sound a giraffe makes when it cums. //Not a troll. //Yes, this is a ripoff of an old Russian joke about the letter Ñ.
In my dreams (Score:5, Interesting)
Open Office is not that program.
However, the beauty of open file formats is that now someone else can write that program, and there will be no barrier to entry, we can start using it right away. In fact, if I am the only person in the world who thinks emacs bindings in a word processor is a good idea, I can use them, and still interoperate with the rest of the world.
Because we all have different ideas of what the perfect word processor will be, this is one step closer to a happy software world.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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: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?
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Every Product Requires Support (Score:5, Interesting)
Those parts of my career that were in support of software, either as a help desk or as network admin with additional duties, required a large amount of support for every program we used. In corporate environments to small business the use of Office required significant support efforts by everyone. Claims that OOo requires more support than others is specious. One can make a heavy bet and know that you'd win in judging that those people making that claim have no experience supporting others on either platform or have never used Open Office. I've watched many firms take OOo, and though there was a learning curve, use it to good advantage.
Because you don't like OOo doesn't mean it doesn't work and do the job it is supposed to do. I use it. Millions of others use it. The few people here disrespecting it (without showing proof they actually know anything about it) demonstrates the specious nature of anything they might write about it or any competing product.
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:Implications (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (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]
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"
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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.
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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."
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Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office (Score:4, Interesting)
You probably also knew about the message queue vulnerability... didn't you? A professional would know.
If you're talking about the one you cited, yes, for years. It's a very moderate vuln actually, even on XP / Windows Server 2003
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?
Look at MSDN : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb625963.aspx [microsoft.com]
Preferably one that explains why it isn't fixed in WindowsXP.
That is very simple: the changes are extensive, too big to be ported back.
I've read through your comment history a bit. You might as well add a signature that says "I'm a Microsoft shill."
Oh right, since I don't talk shit about MS like you do, I must be a Microsoft shill... Now I could go take a look at your comment history and tell you you're a [some insult], but what good would that be ? That would say more about me than you.
The reality is, I'm right and you're wrong, you had no idea what you were talking about and got caught red handed.
Calling others shills won't change any of that.
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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:A Bit Misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I used to work for IBM. Having used MS Office, several OpenOffice.org variants, WordPerfect X* and IBM Lotus Symphony, all in various versions
but, typically only for intermediate use ( no really complex docs or fancy macros ), I have to say that Office 2003 would be my first pick if money isn't an issue.
Second, would be the Go variant of OO.o ( http://www.go-oo.org/ [go-oo.org] ) and Lotus Symphony would be WAAAY at the back.
It's slow at everything, and, for what i do, lacking in features. If money is an issue, then any variant of OO.o plus Gnumeric for really big spreadsheets,
(yes, Gnumeric really is that good and George Ou should have done his tests on it before clamoring that an open source app couldn't match Excel 2003)
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Document formats... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lotus then created SmartSuite. My favorite office suite off all times, up until now! I wait until something like the InfoBox, but with full keyboard control, is available again. For now, the new Symphony is still far away from that. And it still thinks that default/pure menu bars and button bars make sense nowadays. (Face it: They are an outdated concept.)
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Re:OpenOffice variant? Shades of the infobox (Score:4, Informative)
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Microsoft Bob reborn? (Score:5, Funny)
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".
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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.
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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.
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Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Interesting)
The single biggest advantage of Lotus Symphony, it provides choice, now you can choose from four different versions of Open Office and still have full document compatibility and operating system choice.
It might be viewed as a new corporate status symbol, if you are really significant in the technology sector you produce your own document compatible fork of open office under you own branding and demonstrate your capabilities that to the general public. A way of reminding your employees of the value of the products they produce and putting an end to them staring at the competitors logo.
This sort of corporate identity creation and branding has a significant impact on the way the public views a company, even major hardware players might start making the shift and supply their computers with their branded office suit, browser et al. With open source the investment needed to achieve that is minimal, especially compared to the marketing advantage that can be gained in highlighting the value of their hardware product and the full range of software tools they provide with it all included in the price.
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Informative)
According to the summary Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.
... Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) ...
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Informative)
It actually uses Eclipse for the GUI and OpenOffice for opening/saving/formatting/displaying documents
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Funny)
It uses 200+ megs of RAM just after starting. Take that, Firefox!
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:4, Interesting)
The speed of Symphony shouldn't be your most serious concern - it's fairly snappy on a fast desktop, aside from the loading time.
It should be noted that Symphony is a HEAVILY modified version of OO.o. Symphony has a very clean UI and is extraordinarily easy to use. However, it does not offer all of the same features of OO.o.
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps IBM want their regular employees to kick Team Eclipse's ass until they make it fast.
Or make people quit out of frustration instead of laying them off.
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And software isn't worse just because it's free.
Re:Just another feabile attempt (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you as stupid as your post appears? IBM are switching to Lotus Symphony which, although it shares a lot of code with OO.o, is an IBM product, developed by IBM staff. This is not 'getting something for free' this is 'using your own products'.
Honestly, Microsoft needs to pay its shills more. The current crop really aren't trying.
Re:Now is not the time to celebrate (Score:4, Interesting)
I've only got a dual-CPU Xeon running at 2.8Ghz with 3Gb RAM. Pity me for my inconsequential hardware specs, I take it back Microsoft, turns out it was my fault all along, Office's not bloated after all :(
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