Dave-

Our mutual friend, Matt (Asay), blogged about this previously.

The issue with OO.o is bloat.

The issue with anything else is compatibility. (Firefox is sortof a bad example here, because to an extent HTML is a standard. Note that there are still many sites that are IE only).

I think ODF is essential (so you aren't playing catchup with MS). Which is a huge chicken and egg problem. But it's promising that governments are starting to push it.

Since KOffice can support it, then it might have a good chance. (Since it is lightweight, and with the new QT will run natively on MS, Macs and Linux....).

All you need to do is add a search bar to kword that defaults to Google (with a little icon) and you'll be rolling in it. :)

-matt

I think an attempt to rebuild the functionality of MS Office as it is now is really not competitive.

MS Office 12 really is more than just a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation tool etc. It comes with all kinds of collaborative features, and an open source competitor really should pay attention to that kind of functionality as well.

Also, the integration with a product like sharepoint is supposed to make it much more manageable, and I think it is if you implement it right.

If this promise of a better manageable, shareable and collaborative office workplace is indeed fulfilled, the choice really isnt up to just the office users - its up to the management and the IT staff. Not that it should be so - I'm just pointing out that they will be prepared to pay up if they can cut down on managing lost documents, crashed laptops etc.

So, an open source equivalent should recognize this claim and choose to go along with that and build that same functionality but cheaper or better, or it must choose to limit itself to building really good standalone office applications and allow for other integrative products to add on this kind of functionality.

Roland Bouman

OOo has been improving with every release. Speed, functionality, interoperability with MS Office. They're all much better now than 12 months ago.

However, OOo is suffering from a severe lack of developer resources. While Sun are to be applauded for the efforts they have made, they cannot succeed on their own (sure Novell and Red Hat help a little as well).

While Mozilla Firefox is a better browser than IE, and Apache is a better web server than IIS, OOo is an okay, but inferior Office Suite. That's certainly not a winning strategy.

The opportunity begs for the Mozilla or Apache Foundations to pick up the challenge. Perhaps even IBM could be convinced to Open Source the OOo derived components of its Workplace product and adopt the same strategy it uses with many of its WebSphere products!

Frank--I completely agree. It would be great to see Novell really get behind the effort. From what I have seen of SLED 10, it will suport Excel VB macros, a great step in getting to business users, but still not enough

"Users don't care about Open XML or OpenDocument file formats. They want their documents, spreadsheets and presentations to look and act the same regardless of who opens them."
Isn't that what PDF is about? Isn't that why the next release of Office will also allow you to save a file as PDF?

Note that if I was sure that there was one ideal XML format to define a document (DocBook? XSL:FO? ...) I'd try to support it in iText, but there are too many, so I focus on PDF generation and manipulation.
I see that iText is used as PDF engine in more and more out-of-the-box applications (Eclipse/BIRT, JasperReports,...). Unfortunately everybody pays for the 'car' (the end-product), nobody pays for the 'engine'...

That's kind of unfair, isn't it?

I think web intergration and collaboration is going to be key to any future MS office replacements. Regardless if its open source or not. Combine Zimbra and Alfresco and you've got the killer app.

According to a recent post by Satish Dharmaraj of Zimbra, the company is adding new Web applications (what might as well be called Zimbra Calc and Zimbra Write) and ALE (AJAX Linking Embedding), a compound HTML document framework for embedding and linking AJAX components. "It's much like what Microsoft's OLE [Object Linking and Embedding] does for rich client apps like Office“ embedding an Excel spreadsheet in a Word document “except you don't need a fat client.

Satish has some cool screenshots on his blog.

This is the future.

"OpenOffice.org is a functional, if not great replacement for MS Office but has quirks and it's own fractured development history to contend with."

So instead of improving upon a well-established alternative to MS office that some organizations are already using (like Novell), you'd rather build another office suite from the ground up? What's to say the newly developed office suite (which will probably take years to develop in order to get up to par with MS office) won't be "quirky" as well?

I suppose it could be, but then it wouldn't be better, would it? If Firefox wasn't better than IE then people wouldn't be using it--at least not as many as there are.

I never said that OO.org couldn't be fixed BTW.

To be honest we are trying hard to go Open but we are heavy in Access use and the plethora of ODBC connectors for linking tables from disperate sources which empowers users and so far OOo and Star 8 fall short; Kexi shows promise. Another problem is printed material (training books / material)

I was encouraged when Novell/Suse did a survey of what users want in their Linux. Unfortunately, the people they most needed to hear from didn't know about the survey.

Big business may be a low hanging fruit, and Linux desktop can make some gains there. But do you know who create the most NEW jobs on a continuing basis? It's small business. And small business owners don't have the time to diddle with a new OS, no matter how much better it may be. The core of a small biz is it's accounting. (Sad but true) Intuit has captured the market, and people aren't going to switch to Linux unless there's native apps for Quicken AND QuickBooks, or a plug in replacement that can read the files, and doesn't suck.

The Linux community has great technical know-how, but there's an incredible lack of business horse-sense. How could you not think that the KDE/Gnome tug-of-war would be a show stopper to widespread adoption, or the million-and-one distros which do nothing for the average user? What a wasted effort. (Though I recognize the tinkering allure.)

I've seen the rants about how profit motive is tainting the whole Linux endeavor. As long as those voices are still heard in the business world, the best long-term market will be forever closed to Linux.

How much of the Novell survey represents the voice of enthusiasts as opposed to business owners. I was hopeful when that survey was run, but afterwards, I realized that Novell was surveying "the choir"

I run Suse 10.0 for net and email, but my Windows machine still runs my critical business apps, and will continue to do so till there are alternatives that show at least some amount of benefit.

I expect it will be many years before I can leave MS behind.

"Users don't care about Open XML or OpenDocument file formats. They want their documents, spreadsheets and presentations to look and act the same regardless of who opens them."

Users should and will care about Open XML or OpenDocument file formats, if they want their documents, spreadsheets and presentations to look and act the same regardless of who opens them.

Office is more of a problem than windows really.

Just look at the terms people use:
You don't create a "spreadsheet", you create an "excel"
You don't write a "document", you open "word"
You don't make a "presentation", you make a "powerpoint"

It is akin to calling a copier room a "Xerox room" when not one Xerox machine is in it.

In general people don't like change, and if you try to change those long standing connections in their head, they will resist.

Something needs to be created that is better than office.

Personally, I think a web-based suite backed by Alfresco for collaboration is the answer.

While making something like this in JavaScript is no easy task, there are some very compelling reasons to.

Can make it available to all your business partners with no installation (maybe an optional one that registers a MIME that turns around and opens docs in the browser).

Can provide links on your site to your own documents through it, people just click on a link & edit.

It is the web, you can slap "Web 2.0" and "AJAX" and other such marketing terms to it, and make it look better than office.

That's really the important part, making something marketable.

Is it worth mentioning that I've suggested to IBM that it release the source code for its Lotus SmartSuite for precisely this reason - besides the other reason, that it blindsides the Resident Monopolist - as seen in recent comments by them on the ODF specification when they confused OpenOffice.org and KOffice, much to everybody's amusement.

But in this context is it also worth pointing out that the real focus isn't on reproducing Microsoft Office's functionality. That is probably trivial by now - relatively speaking! ;) - there is so much of the necessary functionality in widespread common use even I can start working on a miniature office suite c. 5MB/10MB for my own satisfaction. The real focus - brought out into the open by our friends the Disabled - is extending what little functionality speech recognition, etc, exists, and making it ordinary.

"Users don't care about Open XML or OpenDocument file formats."

That is an incorrect generalization. There is a technical community, myself included, who care a great deal about using and promoting open formats, and we're teaching other "users" why they are necessary.

A suggestion:
A front end similar to what MS Office or OpenOffice. It is not necessary to be very sophisticated: anything like lyx will do.
This front end will generate an intermediate file similar to latex code or XML.
In this way, most people would enjoy a lightweight method to compose documents quickly and intuitively, without all the overfeaturing of MSOffice and OpenOffice.

But when things like layout, precise positioning becomes a problem, a knowledgeable person would be able to tweak the intermediate code.
It would be a typesetting program accessible to common people.
The same principle would be applied to presentation graphics, animation, spreadsheet, etc. The intermediate file would have all markups that make the multimedia effects possible. In this way, we would be able to write programs that will output the markups, instead of having to always use the graphical front end.
It would also be nice to have functions similar to those available in the scribus open source application.
This would be the ultimate application to make MSOffice a thing of the past.

Every office that's used PCs that I have worked in has used documents and spreadsheets overwhelmingly. Those two are the "office productivity suite". Presentation is cute, but unrelated to "productivity" in reality.

That's not to say that OOo doesn't have some problems, but they are the same problems MS Office has, with the caveat that MS Office continues to get larger and slower (even with the MS hacks in their OS to support it) while the evolution of OOo has been conspicuous improvement over time.

Indeed OpenOffice.org is in place and ready to go. No need to re-invent the wheel. It works today, on the OSs with which companies are already familiar. After all, users don't care about the underlying OS, they care about pushing a button and getting what they expect.

What I want to see is a few smart companies say to OOo, "We'll give you what we would have spent on MS Office so that you will include the following features / improve the following functions that we need..." Combine that with the OpenSource bounty system for features/bugs, and I don't see any problem that cannot be overcome including bloat. What is "bloat" anyway but "insufficient where-with-all to do optimization"?

Open Standard File Formats come into play here because if/when such are implemented by policy within an organization, the particular application becomes less important. "We" all know that MS will not support ODF unless their pubic hair catches fire, but several different document programs already do. Compatibility is on the verge of being a non-issue just as it was in the mid 1990's when the .DOC format became the world standard.

Mr. Rosenberg, Mr. Asay, I agree with the issues you present. I also believe that those issues are answered by OOo today and will only be better answered tomorrow as OOo gains acceptance. Hopefully, acceptance by you and those to whom you are writing as well.

Bob-