French police to switch to OpenOffice
Plastic PPRuNer
Thread Starter
French police to switch to OpenOffice
Not wishing to bang on inappropriately in Ghengis' thread detailing his struggles with MSOffice formats, I thought I'd open another one on OpenOffice.
French police to switch to OpenOffice (from heise/online)
"The French police are planning to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, the French industry news service Toolinux reports. By the end of January some 35,000 PCs and workstations are to be equipped with the open source office suite; by this summer the number is to reach 80,000. The French police expect to be able to cut costs amounting to more than two million euros by this move."
On Windows presumably.
Maybe you can't imagine Microsoft losing much sleep over the defection of a few snail-chewing gendarmes but it's yet another straw in the wind.
It may be just a ploy of course: These days, the way to reduce your software costs is to whisper to Microsoft that you are thinking of switching to an alternate OS or office suite. Immediately dozens of reps descend offering you unbelievable below-cost deals on the packages (with a sting of course, you have to sign a contract for XX years...). I know, that's what's happening at my University (very hush-hush of course).
Curious thing, if OOo (or Linux) was a business in the traditional sense (Red Hat and Novell/SuSE really only sell support) then there'd be writs aflying about anticompetitive behaviour and restraint of trade practices. Not that legal action scares Microsoft - faced with huge fines by the EU they just pay and carry on, fines that would cripple a small country are nothing to MS - their wealth and influence effectively put them above the law (DOJ vs Microsoft).
Now, I don't hate MS (you can't really hate a company) but I have to say that I find their behaviour distasteful, to say the least. XP Pro is actually a pretty good and stable (for me, but I'm a bit obsessive) product, ditto Office 2003, but they're very expensive in comparison these days.
But leaving their rapacious behavior aside, I (and an increasing number of others) find the deliberate barriers to interoperability, the insistence on proprietary formats, the vendor lock-in and the upgrade treadmill increasingly irksome.
When will MS realise that no-one wants to see their precious source code, they just want full (as opposed to limited) documentation of the interfaces mecessary to write effective applications for the XP (or Vista) platform. What annoys people is that MS alone have access to the full specs, so their programs have an inherent advantage. IANAL (I'm not a lawyer), but this seems to me a rather unhealthy situation.
But back to OpenOffice - with the release of OOo 2.0 late last year, OpenOffice finally grew up and became a viable alternative to MSOffice.
It isn't perfect and has been compared to Office 97 - Office 97 was an extraordinarily good product, as evidenced by the fact that MS is still battling to get people and companies to abandon it and buy their latest and greatest offering by fair means (heavy advertising and lobbying) and foul (like changing the document formats).
Actually OOo is rather better than Office 97, it doesn't have the polish of Office 2003, has a few (rapidly disappearing) bugs and doesn't always deal well with complex Microsoft documents (hardly it's fault, since the MS formats are secret). Considering the complex reverse engineering involved, the degree of compatibility that it does have is an extraordinary achievement (and gets better by the week).
It is important to separate (am I the only one who can spell separate?) OpenOffice from the OpenDocument format. The OASIS OpenDocument XML format was agreed upon by a consortium of industry players (Sun, Apple, IBM and others (including Microsoft!) last year. See the excellent Wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
The specifications are open and can be implemented by anyone (including Microsoft and your Aunt Bessie) who wants to write software to read, modify and create documents - it isn't specific to OpenOffice or any particular company or application.
Give OpenOffice a try - it's free at http://www.openoffice.org/ - you may be pleasantly surprised.
French police to switch to OpenOffice (from heise/online)
"The French police are planning to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, the French industry news service Toolinux reports. By the end of January some 35,000 PCs and workstations are to be equipped with the open source office suite; by this summer the number is to reach 80,000. The French police expect to be able to cut costs amounting to more than two million euros by this move."
On Windows presumably.
Maybe you can't imagine Microsoft losing much sleep over the defection of a few snail-chewing gendarmes but it's yet another straw in the wind.
It may be just a ploy of course: These days, the way to reduce your software costs is to whisper to Microsoft that you are thinking of switching to an alternate OS or office suite. Immediately dozens of reps descend offering you unbelievable below-cost deals on the packages (with a sting of course, you have to sign a contract for XX years...). I know, that's what's happening at my University (very hush-hush of course).
Curious thing, if OOo (or Linux) was a business in the traditional sense (Red Hat and Novell/SuSE really only sell support) then there'd be writs aflying about anticompetitive behaviour and restraint of trade practices. Not that legal action scares Microsoft - faced with huge fines by the EU they just pay and carry on, fines that would cripple a small country are nothing to MS - their wealth and influence effectively put them above the law (DOJ vs Microsoft).
Now, I don't hate MS (you can't really hate a company) but I have to say that I find their behaviour distasteful, to say the least. XP Pro is actually a pretty good and stable (for me, but I'm a bit obsessive) product, ditto Office 2003, but they're very expensive in comparison these days.
But leaving their rapacious behavior aside, I (and an increasing number of others) find the deliberate barriers to interoperability, the insistence on proprietary formats, the vendor lock-in and the upgrade treadmill increasingly irksome.
When will MS realise that no-one wants to see their precious source code, they just want full (as opposed to limited) documentation of the interfaces mecessary to write effective applications for the XP (or Vista) platform. What annoys people is that MS alone have access to the full specs, so their programs have an inherent advantage. IANAL (I'm not a lawyer), but this seems to me a rather unhealthy situation.
But back to OpenOffice - with the release of OOo 2.0 late last year, OpenOffice finally grew up and became a viable alternative to MSOffice.
It isn't perfect and has been compared to Office 97 - Office 97 was an extraordinarily good product, as evidenced by the fact that MS is still battling to get people and companies to abandon it and buy their latest and greatest offering by fair means (heavy advertising and lobbying) and foul (like changing the document formats).
Actually OOo is rather better than Office 97, it doesn't have the polish of Office 2003, has a few (rapidly disappearing) bugs and doesn't always deal well with complex Microsoft documents (hardly it's fault, since the MS formats are secret). Considering the complex reverse engineering involved, the degree of compatibility that it does have is an extraordinary achievement (and gets better by the week).
It is important to separate (am I the only one who can spell separate?) OpenOffice from the OpenDocument format. The OASIS OpenDocument XML format was agreed upon by a consortium of industry players (Sun, Apple, IBM and others (including Microsoft!) last year. See the excellent Wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
The specifications are open and can be implemented by anyone (including Microsoft and your Aunt Bessie) who wants to write software to read, modify and create documents - it isn't specific to OpenOffice or any particular company or application.
Give OpenOffice a try - it's free at http://www.openoffice.org/ - you may be pleasantly surprised.
Sorry, just being a tart.
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Re: French police to switch to OpenOffice
While you are playing at spelling, and a lot of people have unnecessary hang-ups about it, try to remember that THIS NEW PPRUNE, now has a spell checker. It's the ABC icon in the top right corner where you type. It works well too.
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Re: French police to switch to OpenOffice
I have Open Office installed on my laptop alongside Office 2003. I still tend to use the Microsoft product out of habit, but the Open Office ability to create PDF files means that it is increasingly becoming my tool of choice. However, despite being a Firefox fan, I still haven't found anything in the Open Source world that can touch Outlook 2003. Yes, I know it is vulnerable, but the ability to copy things to and from email and calendar and then synchronize directly with my Palm is worth it's weight in electrons.
BTW where is this new spelling chucker? I haven't found it yet?
BTW where is this new spelling chucker? I haven't found it yet?
Plastic PPRuNer
Thread Starter
Re: French police to switch to OpenOffice
BN, I'll give you "mecessary" (obviously a misstype rather than a misspelling), but "aflying", if somewhat archaic and perhaps a little mannered, was intended. "Behavior" is American, I'm afraid, but nowadays quite legit.
"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still aflying,
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying."
[Robert Herrick]
Could you touchtype 712 words with only one mistake? Probably not.
"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still aflying,
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying."
[Robert Herrick]
Could you touchtype 712 words with only one mistake? Probably not.
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Re: French police to switch to OpenOffice
For my sins, I was in PC World the other day and it seems that they and the rest of the DSGi Group (huge UK-based but international electronics retailer) are using OpenOffice too. Momentum is gathering - I just wish the Mac version would hurry up and improve - ironically Microsoft Office for the Mac is a very good product, much better in some ways than the PC equivalent 
'nough said
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Re: French police to switch to OpenOffice
Originally Posted by Gouabafla
BTW where is this new spelling chucker? I haven't found it yet?
This icon
is in the advanced editor when you are posting (top right hand-corner of posting editor).But sadly it involves the download of a file.
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Re: French police to switch to OpenOffice
We tried deploying Open Office 2.0 across the company (>1200 PCs) but the users hate it. Probably a simple matter of change resistance, but the opposition to it is real enough to make us reconsider. If we do go back to Microsoft (and their salesmen are already in town offering specials 
) we shall probably only deploy it on selected machines where the user can prove "special needs" though. For the rest, they'll get used to it eventually.
) we shall probably only deploy it on selected machines where the user can prove "special needs" though. For the rest, they'll get used to it eventually.
