May 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Lots of open source and open standards tech people, including me, have long anticipated this, but now a mainstream financial site, Motley Fool, is predicting “The Fall of Microsoft Office.”
Microsoft has publicly announced it will support ODF in its Office suite. If implemented honestly (a big question for Microsoft), this throws open the doors to competition in a way MSO has never had to deal with before.
“I can’t say that Google or Sun or anybody else just won a bigger share of the office software market, and if they did, it won’t help their revenue or profits directly anyway. But it’s clear as day that Microsoft just took a serious hit, and the impact may take a long time to make itself felt but it will come.
“The company’s biggest revenue generator may be a shadow of its former self in a few years. I just hope that Microsoft has some alternative business prospects on tap — and no, tackling Google’s search hulk head-on doesn’t count.”
Microsoft’s Office is going to lose marketshare, and Motley Fool sees this as having a big impact on Microsoft’s core profitability.
From the perspective of open source users, it means Microsoft will have less money to spend on attacking us, which is a good thing.
From the perspective of all computer users, especially small businesses, it means costs will decline as the $400 price for Microsoft Office is no longer a required expense–using the free OpenOffice.org instead will be an easy alternative.
With OpenOffice 3.0 coming this fall, it’s time to expect another big jump in its user share. Let’s watch!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Motley Fool: “The Fall of Microsoft Office”
May 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Sun’s coders have developed yet another killer extension for OpenOffice.org: the Sun Presenter Screen.
Andre Fischer announces the Presenter Screen’s (beta) release on GullFOSS:
“The Presenter Screen extension supports presenters by showing information that is not visible to the audience. A typical environment would be a laptop showing the Presenter Screen and a connected beamer showing the actual presentation to the audience. Initially the Presenter Screen extension shows a live preview of the current slide, a preview of the next slide and tool bar with navigational buttons and the current and elapsed time.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Extensions: Sun Presenter Screen
May 22nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Still in development and not scheduled to be a final release for almost four months, nevertheless OpenOffice 3.0 beta is garnering great reviews around the net.
Erwin Tenhumberg has recently pointed out three such reviews of the Mac OS X version:
Review One: Reviewed on The Apple Blog: “The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads, even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece.”
Review Two: From a Usenet posting you can read through Google Groups: “It is more that three times as fast as NeoOffice and more than twice as fast than both MSOffice 2004 and 2008! – And until now i haven’t had a single ‘unexpected quit’ with the last two builds of OOo3.0. – Also the fonts handling is quite a lot better than in NeoOffice and MSO2004/2008.”
Review Three: Reviewed by a reader on Macintouch.com: “I’m very impressed with the first public release beta of OO for OS X. It is both faster and more stable than the Office 08 demo I tried out. Since I’m not working in a corporate setting and don’t need absolute compatibility with Microsoft, I see no reason to purchase Office 2008 for an Intel native office suite. The presentation module isn’t near as slick as Keynote but the word processing and spreadsheets are more capable than Pages and Numbers. If you need that extra functionality then give OO a try.”
Posted in Mac, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on More OOo 3.0 Mac Reviews
May 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Preston Gralla of InfoWorld tests the current beta of OpenOffice 3.0 and asks “Can OpenOffice 3.0 finally replace MS Office?”
Grandiose headline notwithstanding, the article is a useful comparison of the two competitors. Gralla ran into instability and bugs that I have not personally encountered in the Mac version I’ve been testing, but is nevertheless quite impressed:
“If you’re not working in an enterprise that has standardized on Microsoft Office, you should think twice before paying full freight for Office, and give serious consideration to this free alternative when the final version is released.”
In conclusion, Gralla sums up:
“For most of what you use an office suite for, you’ll find that OpenOffice 3.0 will more than fill your needs. Whether you’re creating documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, the suite offers all the basics and much more. There are excellent formatting tools, mail merge, macros, solid charting tools, and the ability to easily create presentations.
“If you’re thinking of switching to OpenOffice from Microsoft Office, expect practically no learning curve. Many keyboard shortcuts are exactly the same, as are many menus and toolbar choices. You’ll be able to import your existing Office documents, and create them in Office formats as well.”
Gralla recommends OpenOffice to home users, students, and small businesses. In my own estimation, at least 90% of current Microsoft Office users could switch to OpenOffice without significant interruption to their work processes.
Posted in OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
May 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Kazunari Hirano blogs “Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. Adopts OOo Company-Wide.”
The company began pilot testing of OOo in April, and on May 12 announced (Japanese announcement) they would migrate completely. They plan to download OpenOffice to their existing computers, and pre-install it on all new PCs the company deploys.
I’m not sure how large this migration is in total, but Hirano reports that just “One of SEI group businesses, Sumitomo Electric Information Co., Ltd., maintains 15,000 PCs within SEI.”
While 2007 saw many large government migrations to OpenOffice, 2008 seems set for even more large migrations in the private sector.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Sumitomo Corp Adopts OpenOffice
May 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
As the library of extensions continues to grow, OpenOffice’s ability to be enhanced with extensions will become an ever-stronger “selling point” (it’s free, so they don’t actually “sell” it) for the application.
One of the most popular is Dmitri Popov’s “Writer’s Tools,” a suite of about 20 tools to simplify professional writing tasks in OOo. (Development is handled on the Google Code site.)
“Writer’s Tools is a set of utilities designed to help OpenOffice.org users perform a wide range of tasks. Using Writer’s Tools, you can back up documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics.”
Get it; it’s really good!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Extensions: Writer’s Tools
May 7th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Linux Journal’s annual user survey has arrived in the form of Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Awards 2008.
More than 5,900 readers completed the survey this January and February to voice their opinions on open source tools, programs and services.
Some of my favorite programs had very strong showings: Ubuntu was the favorite primary Linux distribution for 37.4% of respondents, Firefox the preferred browser for 86%, and OpenOffice the favorite office program of 85.1%.
Many of my other favorites appeared, such as GIMP, Eclipse, WordPress, Drupal, Frozen Bubble, the Nokia N800, OLPC XO, and more.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Awards 2008
May 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Developed in Hungary, EuroOffice is a suite derived from OpenOffice.org with the addition of several custom features.
The project is working hard to address specific market needs while playing nicely in the OOo development ecosystem:
“Since it is open-source we hope that these additions will be considered improvements by our users and adopted in the future by OpenOffice.org developers. We have signed the JCA, so nothing stands in the way of adoption.”
Some of its unique features include a dictionary toolbar, map chart, solver and adaptive interface. EuroOffice looks like a solid product.
“EuroOffice is developed by MultiRacio Ltd., a Hungarian firm with a past in economical statistics and of course office application localization and development.”
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on EuroOffice: An OOo-Derived Suite
April 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Colin Charles notes the government of Malaysia has progressed in its path to OpenOffice and ODF adoption in his post “OpenOffice.org and ODF adoption in Malaysia – thumbs up!”
“MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008.”
The story gets even better, as many of Malaysia’s federal and state government agencies have already migrated to OpenOffice over the past few years, and more are planning to do so this year.
Colin Charles writes, “Now, you can hold them to their word, as they update a Wiki page, informing you about how many agencies are moving to OpenOffice.org. Big wins, once all of the Malaysian government related agencies are on OpenOffice.org (open source software in general). Again, read OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption!”
Note the links in the above paragraph all point to the same location, but it’s well worth a visit to see the list of agencies that have rolled out OOo to hundreds or even thousands of their employees across the country.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption in Malaysia
April 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The OpenOffice.org Extensions ecosystem continues to grow. In fact, the OOo development team has adopted a strategy of providing some core functions as extensions, in order to keep the code base smaller but allow users to selectively adopt features useful to them.
While I have not tested it yet, I just discovered the Sun Wiki Publisher extension, which sounds like a great tool to get more people using company intranet wikis, among other uses.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | 1 Comment »