On Jul 23, 11:45 pm, "DFS" <nospam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Rex Ballard wrote:
> > On Jul 23, 4:06 pm, "DFS" <nospam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > That's probably a very subjective opinion, especially since OO and
> > other ODF supporting suites tend to offer a lot more "Bang for the
> > Buck".
>
> Besides OO, what other ODF-supporting office suites are there?
Lotus Symphony, WordPerfect, FrameMaker, KDE Office?
> The market hasn't demanded an open document spec,
Most publishers store their content in SGML and convert it to other
formats such as PDF and HTML. This standard archive format has made
it much easier to manage content over a decade old. Most proprietary
formats, including Microsoft's cannot be reproduced reliably.
Remember when ABC news got the document that said George Bush was
grounded because he was doing drugs? It was successffully challenged
because the optically scanned document had been stored in WORD format,
but when it was opened with Word from OfficeXP which added 21st
century "embellishments", the story had to be retracted even though it
had been obtained from a government archive.
Similar types of things happen in other court cases. Word is just not
reliable as a legally recognized archive format. In many courts, the
official documents would be moving from WordPerfect markup format to
ODF, not from MS-Office to ODF.
> In 20 years of working in offices, I've not once heard anyone
> complain that their data is "locked-in" to Microsoft. That's a cola/Linux
> idiot thing.
Actually, quite the opposite. Documents prepared in Microsoft Office
format has to be converted to EDI or XML for the formal EDGAR filing
archives managed by the SEC.
One of the big problems with MS-Office formats is that is is extremely
difficult to automate data extraction from "free form" text Word
documents containing text tables and other "pretty" layouts.
Every new release of Word causes chaos in corporate America as
consultans using pirated copies distributed via MSDN and still used
after the formal release (which violates the MSDN license terms and
therefore results in becoming pirated software). They start sending
out unreadable documents in the "new" format and seem to be too stupid
to know how to "Save as" the earlier format.
The result is a huge feud between the contractors and consultants and
the pro-Microsoft users, and the corporate executives and managers who
are fully aware that adopting the new version of Office pretty much
means no bonuses for the next 3-5 years.
> I would guess maybe 1 in 1,000,000 users care that the
> spreadsheet data is supposedly "open".
If you look at a financial report, a stock price, stock price history
charts, or numerous other forms of numerical statistics, it's because
those values are managed using "portable" data formats such as EDI,
SGML, and other publicly documented "Open" standards. ODF is just the
next natural step, designed to allow archival of more complex content
in similarly open formats.
> > Even if it's true that OO isn't as functional, polished and virus
> > friendly as Office 2007, it's "Good Enough" to compete in the
> > marketplace based on standard measurers such as ROI and TCO, and win
> > quite favorably.
>
> How can you tell? Nobody uses it.
> Oh I know you cola wacks think there are
> 200,000,000 OO users out there, but I bet you've
> never once seen it being
> run out in public or at a client site.
Completely wrong. I have often sent both ODF documents and Office
documents, and have even had requests that I not waste e-mail
bandwidth and storage by sending the Office format.
One of the big advantages is that I can store the ODF documents in
CVS, SVN, or ClearCase repositiories quite efficiently and we can do
redline reviews of the documents from the repository. OO and Symphony
have good support for "track edits" of speadsheets and presentations
as well as the text documents.
There have been TCO studies of Open Office using benchmark projects
where all members of the team used Open Office to exchange complex
format documents.
There are also projects like the Linux Documentation Project which
have shown how Open SGML document standards have made it possible for
huge teams to collaborate on complex content, even in numerous
languages.
The biggest issue is Enterprise Content Management, keeping track of
millions of free-form documents used to support everything from
contracts to credit applications, mortgages, and loans. ALL of this
content needs to be managed in a manner that makes it easy to not only
retrieve all of the related documents in the event of a legal dispute,
but also to delete records from the archive an appropriate period
after the contract or related legal agreement has been concluded
(usually 7-10 years).
> > Keep in mind that Office 2007 imposes a double whammy in terms of
> > expense. In addition to the increased cost of software,
> You didn't hear? Office 2007 is no more costly than Office 2003.
I know you are not an idiot, but you do really seem to miss the point
sometimes. If you have a company with computer using employees, who
already have Office 2000 or Office XP, you have to obtain and install
Office Software, usually by doing a "Reimage" of the hard drive.
Alternatively, you have to purchase brand new computers for those
employees you want to upgrade. You then have to back-up all of the
data from the user's hard rive, and transfer that data to the new
machine. Because you can't capture all the settings and preferences
the way you can with Unix or Linux, you also have to figure that users
will spend about a week trying to get their preferences right, trying
to recover lost passwords and cookies, trying to install third party
software essential to their jobs, and all of the other preferences and
content issues.
The average actual cost in lost productivity is about $10,000 per
employee, and has almost nothing to do with the price of Windows or
Office.
VMWare has found a way to take the pain out of Migration to Linux.
VMWare converter can capture the entire system and back it up to an
external USB drive, then Linux can be installed on a new machine
licensed with Vista or XP, and the XP image can be "restored" and run
using VMWare player. This lowers the cost of migration to about
$1,000.
Adding OpenOffice to a PC is even cheaper. Users can download and
install the software for free, it takes about 15 minutes to install,
and the user still has MS-Office 2000 or XP or whatever they were
using before.
This drops the price to about $100 in learning the new OpenOffice user
interface which is similar but not identical to Office. A corporation
can convert 1000 users for about $100,000 and the price can drop even
lower if the staff does the download and learning on their own time.
Essentially, all the company has to do is establish a policy granting
permission to download/install Open Office. About 700 million
corporate PC users, students, and government officials now have
OpenOffice installed and can handle an odt, odp, or odc document when
they receive one.
Many companies are now publishing presentations and company-wide
documents in both ODF formats and Office formats.
I have even noticed that many documents published in both formats
actually have the ODF version looking better than the MS-Office
formats.
Most final documents are stored in PDF formats, and OpenOffice has
built-in conversion to that format as well.
> And the Home/Teacher edition is downright cheap,
> at $92 on Amazon (for Word Excel Powerpoint and OneNote
> that can each be installed on 3 or 4 systems).
The problem is that making the upgrade has an impact on more than just
the student. If mom or dad take work home with them, they legally
have to upgrade the Office to Professional, or buy another computer,
which increases the price to the price of the computer.
If a high school teacher tells his students that they must use Office
2007 format, and he teaches the average 8 classes of 40 students per
day, that's 320 families who will be forced to fork over an extra
$1000 or more plus their time and training, Just because the teacher
wants to play with his new toy.
If that same teacher requests documents in ODF formats, the cost is
negligable, usually only the cost of the time to download over a high
speed internet connection. Though OO is small enough that it can be
downloaded over a low-speed dial-up in about an hour if necessary.
> > you have the
> > incompatibility with previous versions of Office, which means that you
> > have the same problem of trying to convert billions of documents
> > written in Office 95, Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP/2003 into
> > the new Office 2007 format, which is completely incompatible with any
> > other third party Office suites or tools.
>
> So the 2007 users will default to read/write
> the 2000/2003 formats that are
> mostly interchangeable.
The problem is that 2007 users are warned in all sorts of nasty
language that they will lose information if they save in the older
format. Ironically, many Office 2007 end up looking pretty flakey
when you view them with Office XP or Office 2000.
If you edit the document with OpenOffice and save it in MS-Office
(2000) format, it will look about the same on both OO and MS-Office.
OO is even getting pretty good at rendering documents created by other
versions of Office (including Office 2007), though there are still
some layout problems when complex macros are used.
> > Conversely, you have ODF suites that can handle the older content
> > formats
>
> Spare us the hyperbole.
> OpenOffice chokes on anything but simple Office
> documents.
It's getting progressively better. StarOffice has better import/
transformation tools, because they have licensed the technology from
Microsoft (part of the $80 price tag)..
Lotus Symphony is very good at saving to MS-Office format, but not as
good at reading from complex MS-Office documents.
> > AND can store/save them in ODF format quite easily, as well as
> > saving them in PDF format. Actually an OSS subset of PDF which is
> > fully compatible with all versions of Acrobat.
>
> Again, you didn't hear? A free add-in lets MS Office save to PDF.
Yes, but it marks the document as "This document was converted to PDF
using an unregisered copy of the converter software", which means that
if you are turning the content over to a client, you had better pay
for the software.
With OO, you just export to PDF and get a fully authorized PDF
document.
> > The ODF documents can be parsed and indexed using any number of XML
> > parsers as well as pattern scanning tools such as PERL and can also be
> > transformed into other useful formats and databases with little or no
> > manual intervention.
>
> I read/write Excel files w/ VB every day and post the data to/from Oracle or
> Access.
True. I've read to/from databases using Excel "data" functions but
extractig content from free-form text isn't so easy. It can be done
using VB, but writing a parser is very much a special function that
has to be custom written for each document.
I can do something similar using antiword and PERL, but ODF makes it
easier to find the "target fields" automatically using a SAX or JAXB
parser.
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