One of key people at Novell responsible for selling Linux into the NSW Government in Australia believes Microsoft is dreaming if it considers Microsoft Office is 10 years ahead of its open source rival, Open Office.org 2.0.

“I think that 10 years behind is probably a comment by someone who might be looking in the wrong direction,” says Paul Kangro, applied technology strategist at Novell.

Kangro is part of a select team of engineers that helps explain Linux architecture to Novell customers globally.

According to Kangro, Open Office 2.0 can already meet the needs of most enterprises and it is incorrect to say that it will not meet the needs of the average user. He also believes the Microsoft argument that its Office has a greater range of capabilities is misleading because most users never use the few additional functions not found in Open Office.

“If you look at what the average user does, they open a document, work on it, they email it, print or do something else with it,” he says. “It’s fair to say that some of those high end capabilities that might be in another product are not be utilised by 99.9% of the people out there.

“I’ve been using Open Office.org 2.0 and it does everything I want. It’s got some great features. A lot of our customers are interested in things like the integrated PDF writer feature. It can open Microsoft documents, create PDF file, save in Microsoft format if people actually want to, so it’s really a superset of the things I could do with the other Office product. At Novell, we’ve worked on the interface and we’ve integrated the Evolution email client so that when I get email from Evolution I click on that to open and it goes straight to Open Office and so on.

“Most importantly, you’ve got thousands of dollars worth of applications that you would otherwise have to purchase which come as part of a standard Linux implementation. If most organisations critically look at what their employees do in a day, and asked could something like a Linux desktop provide everything they need for the vast majority of their users, I thinking the answer would be a resounding yes.”{moscomment}