Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4348 mails)
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Re: [SLE] [OT] Top-posting is so Microsoftish
- From: Kevin McLauchlan <kmclauchlan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 11:15:49 -0400
- Message-id: <200210151115.49786.kmclauchlan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Monday 14 October 2002 22:59, Anders Johansson wrote:
> Is there any functionality in MS Office that is not
> present in StarOffice 6.0? Aside from the problem you
> mentioned about the odd mistranslation when handling MS
> Office docs I mean.
Well, it seems that the folks in the office who created
(and own) most of the docs that get passed around,
have managed to incorporate things that break when
they go through OpenOffice 1.0.1.
It's not considered advantageous if I have to spend
extra company time to make their docs readable on
my system (especially tables and forms fields), and
it's really considered undesireable for me to return
a document in a form that requires remedial work
from anyone else.
I haven't used StarOffice 6, yet. I know it has additional
filters for such things as Word Perfect, but I had not
heard that it's any more robust when handling (apparently)
obscure combinations of MS Word and Excel features.
I realize that it's probably not a big deal to re-do the
offending documents in OOo, so that they would
survive round-trips unscathed, but this is a selling job,
as much as anything. It's difficult to persuade users
in Finance or Engineering that they should abandon
MS Office when it means they'd need to re-author
many of their existing documents. We want to minimize
the resentment when it comes time for the big change.
> > - MS Outlook
>
> I assume you mean the outlook/exchange combo.
Yes.
> Most of the functions you mentioned, including the
> voting, the massive mails resulting from
> back-and-forthing between various techs and manager,
> seems to me you could replace immediately and with gain
> in productivity with a good intranet solution. Say
> something based on one of the phpNuke relatives perhaps,
> with a database backend for document handling.
I'm not familiar. Is this stuff part of the distribution? It
might have been among the stuff I didn't bother to
load from the 8.0 CDs.
> There are
> also ready made products on the net for your synchronised
> calendar needs.
I saw one or two hosted services, but those were vetoed
due to security concerns. We need to implement in-house,
self-contained solutions. I'll look further for non-hosted
apps that do the job.
I think the lan/web-based solutions are probably the
best idea, because we will have at least one
department remaining on Windows for a while,
because of the other tools they use. For example,
there's a big (for us) investment in Great Plains/Siebel
software, that Finance will not be junking without
strong reasons and advantages.
> Or if you're a little more "up-market" in your
> requirements, there are IBM solutions based on Lotus
> Domino
Among other things, we all took a pay cut this past summer.
We're operating from revenue, and not touching our
reserves.
No "up-market" here, for a while.
> Of course the mailing capabilities can be replaced by
> sendmail, postfix, qmail or what have you, and kmail
> handles regular mail perfectly well without the threat of
> viruses.
I think that was assumed (by our IT crew). To succeed with
their own selling job, they need to provide our troops with
the productivity features of Outlook/Exchange-server -- the
shared access to everybody's calendars, the
meeting-scheduling and resource-scheduling, the voting
and notification, that ties in so smoothly with e-mail.
In other words, the users don't care about the underlying
reasons for a change. They just want to keep working
with minimal disruption. So, anything that looked like
they were losing useful functionality would be less
than attractive.
If that web/PHP solution will do it, then great.
My personal opinion is that it would be nice
if we could go with stuff from SuSE, as
much as possible, but because we have to
support Red Hat for our products, there's a
strong push to make RH our working distro.
All I do is suggest stuff when I hear about it, and
try stuff when they want a guinnea pig. So far...
so-so.
/kevin
> Is there any functionality in MS Office that is not
> present in StarOffice 6.0? Aside from the problem you
> mentioned about the odd mistranslation when handling MS
> Office docs I mean.
Well, it seems that the folks in the office who created
(and own) most of the docs that get passed around,
have managed to incorporate things that break when
they go through OpenOffice 1.0.1.
It's not considered advantageous if I have to spend
extra company time to make their docs readable on
my system (especially tables and forms fields), and
it's really considered undesireable for me to return
a document in a form that requires remedial work
from anyone else.
I haven't used StarOffice 6, yet. I know it has additional
filters for such things as Word Perfect, but I had not
heard that it's any more robust when handling (apparently)
obscure combinations of MS Word and Excel features.
I realize that it's probably not a big deal to re-do the
offending documents in OOo, so that they would
survive round-trips unscathed, but this is a selling job,
as much as anything. It's difficult to persuade users
in Finance or Engineering that they should abandon
MS Office when it means they'd need to re-author
many of their existing documents. We want to minimize
the resentment when it comes time for the big change.
> > - MS Outlook
>
> I assume you mean the outlook/exchange combo.
Yes.
> Most of the functions you mentioned, including the
> voting, the massive mails resulting from
> back-and-forthing between various techs and manager,
> seems to me you could replace immediately and with gain
> in productivity with a good intranet solution. Say
> something based on one of the phpNuke relatives perhaps,
> with a database backend for document handling.
I'm not familiar. Is this stuff part of the distribution? It
might have been among the stuff I didn't bother to
load from the 8.0 CDs.
> There are
> also ready made products on the net for your synchronised
> calendar needs.
I saw one or two hosted services, but those were vetoed
due to security concerns. We need to implement in-house,
self-contained solutions. I'll look further for non-hosted
apps that do the job.
I think the lan/web-based solutions are probably the
best idea, because we will have at least one
department remaining on Windows for a while,
because of the other tools they use. For example,
there's a big (for us) investment in Great Plains/Siebel
software, that Finance will not be junking without
strong reasons and advantages.
> Or if you're a little more "up-market" in your
> requirements, there are IBM solutions based on Lotus
> Domino
Among other things, we all took a pay cut this past summer.
We're operating from revenue, and not touching our
reserves.
No "up-market" here, for a while.
> Of course the mailing capabilities can be replaced by
> sendmail, postfix, qmail or what have you, and kmail
> handles regular mail perfectly well without the threat of
> viruses.
I think that was assumed (by our IT crew). To succeed with
their own selling job, they need to provide our troops with
the productivity features of Outlook/Exchange-server -- the
shared access to everybody's calendars, the
meeting-scheduling and resource-scheduling, the voting
and notification, that ties in so smoothly with e-mail.
In other words, the users don't care about the underlying
reasons for a change. They just want to keep working
with minimal disruption. So, anything that looked like
they were losing useful functionality would be less
than attractive.
If that web/PHP solution will do it, then great.
My personal opinion is that it would be nice
if we could go with stuff from SuSE, as
much as possible, but because we have to
support Red Hat for our products, there's a
strong push to make RH our working distro.
All I do is suggest stuff when I hear about it, and
try stuff when they want a guinnea pig. So far...
so-so.
/kevin
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