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