[snore.]

Most companies we work with want Office 2007, period, despite the learning curve. Can you substantiate your claim that "companies are looking for OpenOffice because they don't like the UI on Office 2007?" While it sounds good I am not so sure it's true.

But my beef was with the article--there's nothing solid there.

Hi -I'm going to critique the article itself:

It's flimsy, light, and 'trendy' - not exactly the result of hard-core study. Not too many concrete reasons are given as to why online collaboration tools are *better* or fill specific business needs compared to word.

Despite its warts, Word *works* and people generally know how to use it. It's tested, it's a known entity, businesses know how much it costs, etc. They're not ready to experiment yet.

Obviously online services have a totally different set of pros & cons, but this article doesn't really seem to address those.

Even if online suites were clearly better suited to business than locally installed software, *this* article does not make a suitable case for switching.

My concern is C-level execs who see this kind of stuff and make sweeping decisions for their company based on a trendy 'puff' piece like this.

I would advise them to go ask Gartner or someone who actually knows how to research this stuff. :)

I've been in IT for a long time - and my company manages a whole lot of backup systems. Our customers usually have mirroring/RAID, and volume shadow copy, and disk backups, and tape backups, and...

As networks grow in complexity I am starting to think it would make sense to require IT pros to get licenses. Even though it would cost me a ton of time & money to license my staff, I think it would prevent idiotic stuff like this from happening--or at least make the licensing board directly responsible for a screwup like this.

Kinda like an electrician, but more like the BAR than anything else - screwing something up big-time (through ignorance or incompetence) could get an IT Pro "disbarred."

There's *no* good excuse for this, period. If your database can't be snapshotted so you can get a clean backup of it--use a different database technology which can.

hear hear - there's a reason tape is not dead yet in the enterprise.