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IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Sep 10, 2007 08:34 AM
from the get-your-conspiracy-theories-warmed-up dept.
from the get-your-conspiracy-theories-warmed-up dept.
Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."
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IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite 378 comments
BBCWatcher writes "Reuters is reporting that IBM plans to announce a free, downloadable office suite today in a direct challenge to Microsoft. The news comes only a week after IBM announced they were joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project. IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony. The new Symphony, based on Open Office, is yet another product to support Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard for universal document interchange. There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free. IBM support will be available for a fee. There are no details yet about platform support, but IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so at least those three are likely."
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Yay (Score:5)
Re: (Score:3)
Assistive technologies (Score:5, Informative)
Still, it's a welcome sight to see IBM participating in OOo development. OOo just keeps improving with every new release, and I find that I use it more than Microsoft Office, although I have both installed at work and at home.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is a fair and accurate point to make. I do see a lot of value to this move, however, beyond just improving accessibility for Windows users. On the one hand, this may make accessibility more cross-platform, so it will be easier to migrate from one OS to another; with OO.org already cross-platform, mak
Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Is this another case of the one division not knowing what the other does, or is IBM giong to drop smartsuite?
Good lord.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm curious about the accessibility support for that helpful feature it has, where entering the password characters puts up random numbers of bullets while hieroglyphics blink randomly around the input box, apparently to distract and confuse shoulder surfers. Do they have a similar function for blind users? And how about sighted users and blind shoulder surfers? Shouldn't it make random annoying noises as well, to confuse them?
Re:Good lord.. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Good lord.. (Score:5, Informative)
We've rolled out a wiki in the same breath as running a huge Notes infrastructure. What I don't understand is that, as crap as the Notes interface is, it's still way ahead of any browser for editing documents. Anyway, so the Notes database is the back-end, and the web-browser is the new client. Call it a wiki, and people love it. Call it Notes database and they'll run a mile. I suppose it must say something about the whole thing.
Parent
Good news, and yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this guy, he just went home, installed it, looked, went "this doesn't look like Office 07" and left it at that. Until we can woo this kind of person, however, I fear that OO, and any open standard wp for that matter, will never truely break into mainstream, because he is the Editor, in charge of a whole department.
Re:Good news, and yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good news, and yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
It shut all the whiners up fast when they found that replacing them is far cheaper than catering to their whining.
You unfortunately have a high level whiner. so you need to have even higher than him do the smackdown.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it."
What about: "It's Corporate Policy. Don't like it, feel free to search another job".
That's what they told me when I didn't want to use Microsoft Office 2003 at work...
I'd love to see the results of a little experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet most of the complainers would announce themselves to be perfectly happy with this, and far prefer it to OpenOffice.
Parent
Notes is EVIL and must be killed (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Notes is EVIL and must be killed (Score:4, Funny)
Tom
Parent
Oh no (Score:3, Funny)
Lotus Notes 8 supports ODF (Score:5, Informative)
It's also worth pointing out here that the upcoming version of IBM's Lotus Notes product includes internal support for ODF documents (.odt, .ods and .odp). Based on what I see in the beta, it looks to me like the ODF support is provided by an embedded and tweaked version of OOo, but I think it's still worth adding Lotus Notes to the list of apps that support ODF.
Notes 8 is built on the Eclipse RCP, BTW, and runs nicely on Linux (which is my platform of choice) as well as Windows and OS X. I imagine it can run just about anywhere Java does. To be honest, I don't think the new version is hugely better than previous versions, and I've never been a big fan of Notes, but for Linux users whose companies use Notes it's really nice to have a native client rather than mucking about with Notes under WINE, or running a Windows OS on another box or in a VM. As an OOo user, it's also very nice to know that I'll soon be able to send ODF documents to my colleagues secure in the knowledge that they can read them.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but I'm not a spokesman for IBM. IBM is happy about that state of affairs, and so am I.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is terribly slow. Looks like a huge piece of bloat. It will be great if it can be faster.
When was the last time you used OOo? Since 2.0, it's not that slow. It's slow in initial loading, but that's because OOo loads the whole suite when starting any of its components, so comparing load time of OOo Writer vs. Word, for example, is not an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Once OOo is loaded, though, it responds very quickly on any fairly decent hardware -- at least like a 1.5 Ghz processor and have a gig of RAM depending on OS.
MS Word is worse. (Score:4, Informative)
MS Office actually load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*.
But there's a taskbar widget for OpenOffice.org that can do the same stuff if you want to get the same startup speed and you don't mind wasting a lot of RAM.
Parent
Re:MS Word is worse. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:faster!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
I wonder .... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)