Microsoft Office is pretty ubiquitous, but most of our clients in the past few years have been complaining that each new version offered little reason to upgrade except that without the new version, you couldn’t open documents others created with the new version. Not really good value for money there, especially when each copy can cost several hundred dollars…

Since we are ourselves somewhat frugal, we have been using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office for several years now. Sure, we still have a few copies of Microsoft Office around when needed, but propeller heads like us get a big discount from Microsoft so the pain to our wallets has been minimal. (FWIW, Typically we exchange documents with others in Adobe Acrobat format, not Microsoft Office. OpenOffice includes a free pdf generator with a one-button click.)

Being open source, OpenOffice is both free and readily customizable by anyone who cares to. Novell (SuSE Linux), offers a version called Go Office which includes bits not included in the version available from OpenOffice.org, like better WordPerfect and Microsoft Office import filters. Sun offers a paid, supported version of OpenOffice and IBM’s Lotus division has a free, supported version of OpenOffice called Lotus Symphony.

Not widely reported, back in the Spring IBM made a decision that the OpenDocument format (a world standard supported by OpenOffice) would be the document interchange standard within IBM. The deadline for all 360,000 IBM’ers to start using Symphony (OpenOffice) instead of Microsoft Office is September 22. Already, 330,000 IBM’ers are using Symphony, according to Linux Magazine (http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/IBM-Throws-Out-Microsoft-Office).

Of course, this doesn’t mean the end of Microsoft Office, but it is a nice reminder that we all do have choices, and that if IBM can cut the cord, then maybe we can do it too.

If you would like to learn if OpenOffice is for you (because it isn’t for everybody), call us at (207) 772-5678.

Mark Stone
CIO

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 6:11 PM and is filed under Productivity, Technology News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.