IBM joins the OpenOffice.org community

Tony Austin
Wednesday, 12 September 2007 03:21

Opinion and Analysis

Getting back to OpenOffice, several months ago I decided to bite the bullet and use it for a serious job instead of just playing with it. After months of intensive development and testing, I was ready to release a new version of my NotesTracker product, see here or here. his involved taking a fairly large document, importing it from Word 2003 format into OpenOffice 2, making extensive changes and additions (weeks of careful editing), and finally creating a PDF final form of the document for download by NotesTracker users: see here or here.

My impression of the OpenOffice Writer product? Extremely competent indeed, and I really appreciated the fact that creating a PDF output document is a standard feature whereas for Word I had to install a PDF virtual printer. I liked the fact that the table of contents in the PDF file had live hyperlinks, so that users clicking on a topic in the TOC are taken directly to the corresponding page in the body of the PDF document. (There may well be one, but I couldn't find a virtual printer that provided this essential feature.)

The Writer does do a number of operations differently from the Microsoft Office 2003 suite, so there is a learning curve. I must admit that did struggle for a while finding out how Writer did certain things -- even some simple actions like how to jump directly to a specified page number. But all in all the Writer was quite okay to use,  certainly no more of a chore than having to learn how Microsoft Office 2008 does things.

Will I stop using Microsoft Office and use OpenOffice exclusively? Of course not. ... Will Qantas or other airlines get rid if all their using Boeings, and fly only Airbus aircraft? Will motorists stop driving their GM or Ford vehicles in favour of Toyotas or Volkswagens? No way, Jose! I'll keep using Microsoft products where it suits, and I'll certainly be using the alternatives like OpenOffice where they do a better or more cost-efficient job. And if I latch onto one that's "good enough" I won't fork out any of my company's hard-earned dollars for an upgrade just because it has a few extra bells and whistles that don't provide any compelling benefit.

The recently released IBM Lotus Notes 8 includes what is essentially IBM's own implementation of the OpenOffice tools, for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations. These go under the name of IBM productivity tools and they may be optionally selected during installation of the Notes 8 client software.

The press release for the announcement should encourage those considering a move to the OpenOffice suite, as well as those who've already been using it.

"This is great news for the tens of millions of users of OpenOffice.org and the thousands of individual members of the community", said John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead. "We welcome IBM's contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO OpenDocument Format standard. ODF is a once in a generation opportunity for the IT industry to unify round a standard, and deliver lasting benefit to all users of desktop technology."