Tag: Office

IBM has an “MS Office Killer” by the end of this year

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I came across this article in several blogposts. It states that IBM may have a potential MS Office killer at hand by the end of this year …

The journalist that wrote the article called IBM to find out more :

…In an telephone interview earlier today, IBM vice president of Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Products Ken Bisconti told me that IBM not only has an ODF-compliant solution in the works, but that it will also be released by the end of the year. That solution is IBM’s Workplace. Built on top of IBM’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based Websphere application server stack, Workplace can trace its pedigree to the collaboration technologies found in Lotus Domino/Notes and to Big Blue’s portal technologies, typically based on WebSphere….


So it’s based on IBM Workplace. I am not sure what the exact scale of implementation / marketshare of Workplace is, but it is not big. The incentive for companies to switch to Workplace and rip out MS Office seems to be ODF ?
I agree that the discussion on Open Document Format is relevant, but by no means it will justify moving to Workplace.

Office 12 UI

Lot’s of discussions and speculation going on about the new UI of Office 12.

A detailled Q&A about Office 12 can be found on the Microsoft website.

One of the PDC websites has a bunch of screensshots of the new UI for various applications including Outlook. As stated in the Q&A, the authoring part of Outlook your calendar, your mail notes and your contacts will change, not the shell of Outlook.

Microsoft Office 12 Gets A New Look And Feel

Microsoft’s Office user interface (UI) design hasn’t changed very much since Word was a Mac-only app in the 1980s. Black and white gave way to color, menus expanded, and the toolbars became more complex. But the overall UI design stayed essentially the same for 20 years. Version 12 of the Office suite, due out in sync with Windows Vista in late 2006, marks a radical shift: Microsoft used Office 12 as a catalyst to completely rethink the UI from the user’s point of view. The changes that Microsoft has made to the interfaces of the Office apps will help new users become productive faster and help veteran users produce good-looking documents in less time. But smart buyers should base purchasing decisions on the suite’s new features, not its new look.

[Via Recent Research from Forrester]

Microsoft Office 12’s Radical New Look

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Down in Los Angeles, Microsoft is holding its annual PDC conference for software developers, led off by a keynote by Bill Gates. Among the things that he’s slated to show off is the user interface of the next version of Microsoft Office. We got a sneak peek at it yesterday–and much to our surprise, it’s a radical departure, not just from Office 2003 and all previous versions, but from the basic look and feel that most Windows applications have had for as long as there’s been a Windows.

How much of a departure? Here are some of the new elements in the suite upgrade, due next year and codenamed Office 12 (actual product name TBD–wonder if it’ll be “Office Vista?”).

Nice overview of some of the new Office 12 features and some screen shots. check out the whole article over on PC World.

Scottish police pick Windows in software line-up – Central Scotland Police is moving away from StarOffice productivity suite

The Central Scotland Police is removing Sun Microsystems Inc.’s StarOffice productivity software from about 400 PCs and switching to Microsoft Corp.’s Office System, citing lower maintenance costs and the need to interoperate more smoothly with other departments running Windows.

It is the latest anecdote in a wider tussle for business between Microsoft and open-source software in Europe. Several organizations, particularly public bodies, have been adopting or experimenting with Linux and other open-source products, but the move by the Scottish police shows the migrations are not all one-way.

“It’s not really based on any ideological argument about open-source software, it’s based on pure business needs,” David Stirling, head of IT for Central Scotland Police, said of the decision to switch.

The agency is one of eight police jurisdictions in Scotland and employs about 1,000 officers and support staff. It adopted StarOffice in 2000 when it was short of cash after paying out for a new crime reporting application, Stirling said. It retained Windows on its desktop PCs but ran the StarOffice applications from a central Sun Unix system and 30 Linux servers installed at branch offices.

The agency said in 2000 that it would see initial savings of at least £245,000 (US$439,000) from switching to StarOffice and Linux, and that the open-source deployment would allow it to bring productivity software to more of its officers.

Early this year, however, the agency reviewed its IT infrastructure as part of an effort to meet performance targets, comply with Scotland’s Freedom of Information Act and work more closely with other law enforcement groups. Following the review, and a follow-up study in March, it decided to switch back to Microsoft.

The force expects to significantly reduce its maintenance and administration costs using the Microsoft software, Stirling said. He stopped short of saying the total overall cost of ownership would be lower, but estimated that the Microsoft software would cost no more and lead to greater efficiencies.

In the past, when the agency deployed a new police application on StarOffice and Linux, the application had to be customized to work with the open-source software, Stirling said. It was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station, he said.

Perhaps most of all, the agency needed its systems to work smoothly with those at other agencies and criminal justice departments. Scotland’s other seven police jurisdictions use Microsoft for their desktops and applications layer, he said. “Even though we’re one of eight police forces, we make up only 5 percent of the police officers. It’s hard to have 5 percent driving the rest of the force,” he said.

Central Scotland Police has now signed a three-year enterprise license agreement that includes the Microsoft Office System, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 for 500 end users.

Help from Microsoft in other areas may have influenced the decision. The company plans to work with Scottish police to develop an electronic document management system to help it comply with requests made under the 2002 Freedom of Information Act, and a document sharing system for police staff, Microsoft said.

The agency isn’t turning its back on open-source software. It plans to retain its Linux firewall and the Linux servers it uses for some of its database applications. Some other jurisdictions are also exploring open-source software, Stirling said.

Asked if he would recommend open-source software to other organizations, Stirling said: “At the time, the move to StarOffice and open-source did suit us, and they played their part. It’s purely about business benefits. An organization would need to take stock of what they have and their interaction with partner agencies. It’s a decision that has to be made purely case by case.”

The agency’s decision is something of an embarrassment for Sun, which played up the deal with Central Scotland Police as a StarOffice success story. It devoted a Web page to it at http://uk.sun.com/sunnews/success/public_sector/102.html

Sun representatives in the U.K. did not return a call for comment.

Source : InfoWorld


Good to see that organisations have tried other solutions and that evaluation of their current environment shows that they can do better with Office System.