Office 2K3

[Jammrock]

I've had a lot of Word to OO conversion problems. O2k3 is a very nice package. I haven't played with the document share features yet, but they look pretty good for us corporate types.

Jammrock

[isochar]

Yes! SharePoint looks like it *could* be a really powerful tool for information collaboration...

[GNEP]

We'll be getting that on our machines in about 2006 then...

[isochar]

Hah, I really doubt SharePoint will catch on at this point in time. Information collaboration via a computer interface is a nice idea, but most of the people out there are not computer junkies. I see something like this as being practical once the X-generation and its followers grow-up to take the place of the baby boomers.

At the MS Launch Event for O2k3 I couldn't help but thinking of everyone just sitting at their computer monitors from morning until night, with face-to-face work going the way of the dodo. Truly a shame since IMHO interacting with your co-workers mano-a-mano is one of the few ways of making work liveable.

[bsdgeek]

OpenOffice is good enough for me, but I've noticed it's really quite sluggish.

[UtwigMU]

WRT to Open Office:

One of our public services decided to switch to open office.

The main reason for this were of course licensing costs of Microsoft Office.

My stance: suppose you run a company where people mostly do stuff in other software (graphic or proprietary or CRM or accounting) and only need Office for letter and to calculate something.

Office pro retail costs $1070 / €910 here. If you buy 1 licence per 20 people for those documents that don't open in MS office, you can save: (We're talking people who mostly use other software.), that results in big savings.

Anyway since they sent their IT guys to the course the guy who was supposed to teach it got scared and I had to check up Open Office and do the dirty work (teach Write, HTML and Draw).

Since they were not regular users it was a real mess.

However WRT to Write - you can do most of the stuff you can do in Word. The problems I've seen - programmed headers and footers, automaticaly merging paragraphs broken in lines and a few other glitches.

But they expected to be able to produce few 100-page long complicated publications using Open Office. I mean Word is not up to the task, if you want to do that you take Pagemaker, InDesign or Quark.

But wether users who are left in dark if someone deletes Word icon from desktop (OMG Word is gone.) will be able to adapt is another question.

[Kurt]

you don't save a dime, you think you would. just the time you waste by finding out the doc you just opened is not compatible with OO, launch word (if it's on the same computer) etc makes you waste time. and as you know, time is money. now try to calculate how many lost hours it would take to pay back 300€ -THAT's the price you have to consider (you're a fool if you buy retail! ).

well to make a long story short: it doesn't take many hours to payback for office pro.

by going OO you do save on the setup cost but your fixed expenditures go up.

to make a comparison, it's like buying a 40€ lexmark printer. the printer doesn't cost you much, but the ink will set you back between 600 to 1200 € after 3 years. if instead you'd have bought the 100€ epson that consumes the least amount of ink you'd spend only 300€ on ink after 3 years.

you tell me who's saving money...

[agallag]

Originally posted by isochar
Hah, I really doubt SharePoint will catch on at this point in time. Information collaboration via a computer interface is a nice idea, but most of the people out there are not computer junkies. ...

SharePoint is catching on big-time in the business world. Collaboration is already a huge application. Think "Lotus Notes". We're in the process of re-writing all our lotus notes apps to sit on Sharepoint. It's also got some really good document management features, like approvals, document check-out, discussions, etc. You'd be surprised how big a splash it's making.

[isochar]

What size business?

[Kooldino]

Originally posted by Gurm
Why? OpenOffice sucks.

- Gurm

Works fine for me.

[Kooldino]

WTF - quote from MMMan's link...

"Screw up the documents of others by modifying, misspelling, and garbling files using Document Workspaces. "

[agallag]

Originally posted by isochar
What size business?

Big