Novell’s novel move to OpenOffice.org
While it is a novel idea for Novell to migrate to OpenOffice.org, is the end of the year a more viable alternative than a end-of-July 2004 dateline?
Even up to this date, employees aren’t exactly convinced – OpenOffice.org might be installed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its being used. Forcing it down throats is what’s happening. And OpenOffice.org still isn’t cutting it for an average person involved in dealing with external customers (unless they get a lot of migration assistance):
- Writer is doing quite well, importing quite the number of Word documents without issues – however, certain data fields don’t show, watermarks don’t import properly, and for some reason, a document with the watermark created in about two revisions earlier, was still displayed. But most documents are fine, save for the weirder bullets issue.
- Calc’s importing of Excel documents are still hit-and-miss. Simple =SUMIF’s actually broke during the conversion. VBA macros obviously break.
- Impress imports PowerPoint presentations fairly well, but drawings like boxes do run quite the bit.
- The Document Converter AutoPilot seems to crash OOo 1.1.1 on machines with about 128MB of RAM in Windows when the document count was around 280 or so. I’ll be playing with this a lot more, I’m sure.
So as a check-list, Michael Meeks and team seem to be working on getting the VBA macro support in OOo – this is going to be very important for the migration to work. I don’t know what miracles we’re going to make on the import/export of files – they have to “just work” (no, PDF’s for clients aren’t useful, when they have to work with you) – so that dealing with clients using the other Office suite, is not an issue. Calc needs to be further enhanced, definitely.
It’s interesting to note that a Florida health organisation actually performed the migration for 3,500 PCs first, even before Novell did! Good beta testing ground, I’m wishing to hear more of their document migration issues, more than anything else.
So did they really start? Not quite, but they’re breaking it down for the staff, and they’re getting their first take at OOo usage – for most, it seems to be similar, with workarounds for the common things to use. For others, problems listed above, exist (among a few minor niggling effects).
Well I hope this general push of larger companies towards OpenOffice will
improve OOo’s usability.
I regularily see people scream out ouf anger over OOo’s strange or unexpected
behaviour. OpenOffice really still needs to make the leap in usability, that Gnome made from 1.4 to 2.0: From “looks like other GUIs” to “behaves consistently and the way people expect”.
Thanks for such comments – maybe its time we go thru a UI review, and fix it…
Thanks for such comments – maybe its time we go thru a UI review, and fix it…