Consider Microsoft Office alternatives

The title of the original discussion "Consider Microsoft Office alternatives" sort of misses the point, IMO.

The IT industry has let itself down badly by allowing proprietary data formats to dictate the software marketplace. If all data was subject to standards (and XML is perhaps finally leading us into this situation), then which office suite we use would be based on a whole different set of crieria, and the survivors would be based on quality, not the most successful marketing or exploitation tactics.

OpenOffice and StarOffice have grasped this principle well, and now offer a commendably high degree of compatibility with the leading proprietary data formats, but have addressed the "open" standards issue by using XML as its underlying format for its own "native" data files.

Best of both worlds... - and considering the low investment in acquiring these products, plus their cross-platform availability, I think MS may well have cause to be worried.

I have never used WordPerfect or its other stable-mates, but have used / still use Lotus SmartSuite. IBM seem to have acknowledged defeat in the office suite wars - Lotus is no longer being developed in the competitive sense, and is therefore a "dead" product with limited and diminishing data compatibility, despite, IMO, being an otherwise competitive package in terms of features.

Let data determine the rules of engagement, and let the software compete on strength and quality.

I use Novel''s GroupWise 6, and although I don't have to administer the system, I find it very functionally powerful. The user interface could do with a little improvement, but that's not to say that it's fundamentally bad...

Other factors, such as security and resilience, need to be borne in mind, and MS's track record in this respect leaves much to be desired.

Novell's acquisition of SuSe Linux bodes well for the development of cross-platform tools, and the sort of integration that won't be as easy or cost-effective with Exchange.

a quick web search provides several
http://www.suse.com/us/business/products/openexchange/

http://www.stalker.com/ Communigate/Communigate Pro

http://www.scalix.com/scalixserver.html based on HP OpenMail also -- see below

http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/ Samsung Contact -- based on what was HP OpenMail Initially released in 1990, OpenMail software has been used by more than 60
percent of Fortune 1000 companies. As the only e-mail server apart from
Microsoft? Exchange to support a wide range of important Microsoft Outlook
features, OpenMail software provides a cost-sensitive enterprise solution
allowing deployment of thousands or even millions of users on a single
server. SDS has used OpenMail software as the basis of its own internal
communication system for five years, providing reliable communications
across the company?s 230,000 users.

http://www.svpal.org/~grantbow/groupware.html

http://moregroupware.sourceforge.net/manual/en/manual.html

etc, etc, etc

... you left out the point that users of alternative software would say, "I can (easily learn and) use Open Office (or others?) and save in MS Word (or PowerPoint etc.) format and send to someone and they can't easily tell what I did; MS Office opens them just fine. Likewise I can read what they send to me. And by doing this I save a ton of money (and resist the evil Borg as well)."

What say you now?

"Want to share letters, documentation, and slide presentations with your business partners? Don't insult them by sending them WordPerfect or Lotus Suite files they can't open."

Erm, maybe I'm wrong, but this is the tyranny of the majority in its worst guise!

Is it not just as insulting for a user of MS Office (this year's rip-off upgrade version) to send a document to a user of a previous version that THEY can't open? Why SHOULD Lotus, WP users, spend good money swapping to a rip-off licencing scheme, just because others say so?

The version-incompatibility scenario fuels the upgrade stampede, just so that everyone can keep up with the pace of the fastest, even though the current version offers few, if any, tangible improveemnts over the previous version.

Remember the maxim "90% of users use 10% of the facilities".

I remain to be convinced that many people need the power of the suite that they have on their PC, whether it's the "standard" or not.

Why they're prepared to pay through the nose for it is a total mystery. It's a mug's game.

Long live OpenOffice (and open source)!

That I was around when Microsoft tried to unseat Word Perfect and exactly the same thing was said then as you are saying now. WP was then the industry standard and everything was measured against it to compare just how well it was written to the "Industry Leader" which Word never came close to I might add. What brought MS Office to the for front was the fact that they developed the integrated Office Suite which previously all these applications where different products from different software houses. That first effort by Microsoft was less than the success that they had hoped for but eventually because of the improved ability to transfer data between different applications Office became the accepted standard even though it was never in the same league as WP.

But what I do find interesting with Office XP or Office 2003 is the fact that a WP converter is no longer available on the install Cd's but is available for download from the Office site, the same applies to the Lotus products for a import converter from 123 to the Microsoft product.

Individually every one of the items inside the Microsoft Office suite is inferior to what was the previous competition but their strength comes in the ability to cross link data between applications and this is exactly why Office will stay at the top of the pile not because it is so much better but because of its inherent ability to transfer data between applications. It is also most likely the reason why Microsoft bought so much Corel Stock and voted down Corel's efforts to develop an Open Source variant of their existing applications.

With no big office utilities being available it effectively means that Windows will remain there to rule as even with the best OS available if there is no industry acceptable software available it will just fail to go anywhere.

Col

I run Open Office, it comes bundled with Linux for Desktops on Novell.

Oh to all the MS junkies out there, that means I didn't have to buy another licence to use it, it came WITH the OS, get it, WITH the OS?

anyway, I can open, save, create, edit, reformat etc. Excell, MSWord, PowerPoint file with it. I can also create a WHOLE new document and SAVE it as a WORD or EXCEL file. Go figure, FREE , did I mention it came IN the box yet?

Oh there's abut 2000 more programs, for FREE, that also came IN the box although I haven't even really begun to use them ALL, as needed I just instal them, from my software drop down list, yes it has that too.

One thing that it DOESN'T do yet is handle Excel macros, but that is coming soon, MS has the leash on that one.

As for industry standard, there isn't one. I have government forms in Word, Word Perfect, Lotus Notes etc. from different and the same governments. One thing that they consistently DO accept is a format crated by our good friends at Adobe. Portable Document Format, now this allows you to take ANY letter from ANY format (including a webpage or URL)and simply distill it into a Portable Document Format (PDF). They even include a wonderful tool called Acrobat Distiller. Now this won't make moonshine but it will take a URL, download the page, allow you to edit it and then save it as a PDF. It also works, with graphics, notepad, Excel, or practically anything you can name, including those strange Autocad files.

But what do we do at the OTHER end you may ask, WE don't have Adobe Acrobat! :-(

Well you just visit the friendly Adobe website at http://www.adobe.com and download the FREE Acrobat reader. Then EVERYONE can see the same documents, nobody paid MS for Office, and everyone is on the same 'page'.

Guess the givernments need a new way to screw us up afterall.

"My point is that MS office offers me no advantage over Wordpefect Suite and in fact causes a number of liabilities"
Enumerate those liabilities, please. MS offers a CLEAR advantage over WordPerfect - more people (business parnters) use MS and more users know how to use it. Your assertion about learning curves with new versions of MS is poppycock. If anything, there have been too few changes since 97/2000/2003 to make a whole heck of a lot of difference.

WP4.x? I used it. What, you don't recall the big differences in the jump from 4.x to 5.x? How about when they went Windows and KILLED the macro language. No longer could you record and edit macros - you had to learn yet another bullsh** "dot notation" language. That's what killd WordPerfect -- they didn't port to Windows very well at all.

I'll bet you drive an electric car and eat only organically grown foods, too, right?

Bells and whilstles sell big time. Many people buy quantity over quality.

I think if you can build a real 'garbage' copy or MS Office (or just clone the one they have now)I could make an equalizer with a flashy spectrum analyzer to sit on the main document window. People would have so much fun watching it bounce and change color as they typed that we'd knock out MS office in no time. Man, the FLASH banners we could advertise with would be AWESOME!

Yay glitz and glam, down with functionality.

If that was the only criteria any of the Office suites would suffice. What made Microsoft Office so well accepted was not the fact that it came bundled with new computers as even then many companies still bought Word Perfect and used that for a long time.

It was that Microsoft did, they allowed the companies to let the users take home a copy of their product and install it on their "home' computers so that they could at lest learn to use it rather than needing to buy a copy of whatever for themselves so the workers drove the change to Microsoft Office rather than the business managers. It was the workers who got a free application and then set about learning how to use it to save themselves money.

This was so successful for Microsoft that they are reintroducing the policy for all their Volume License Customers if it hasn't already happened as I haven't actually looked at a new Volume License Agreement lately but at the last Microsoft Partners Meeting it was coming soon so it is in all likely hood already here. Of course this time they are pushing Front Page and Project but any MS software that is bought on a Volume License is about to be able to be installed on the same number of "Home" computers with Microsoft's blessing.

It worked once and there is no reason to believe that it will not work again.

Col

But the Word Perfect Office 11 Suite still has many advantages over the Microsoft version of 2003.

Currently Microsoft's Office is nearly comparable with WP's Office 8 version with a few exceptions but there are still a lot of improvements in the 11 version of the Corel product that make it a viable alternative to the Microsoft product. incidentally have you noticed that Microsoft no longer has a WP converter built in but if you want it you can download it from their Office site.

World Domination here comes Microsoft again LOOK OUT!

Col