Once you're dead you're made for life - Jimi Hendrix
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Big Blue banishes Microsoft Office
AFTER YEARS of having a half-hearted anti-Vole policy for its employees, Big Blue is dumping Microsoft Office in favour of its own version of Open Office, Lotus Symphony.
More than 60,000 IBM workers have been told to stop using Microsoft Office. According to the German economic newspaper Handelsblatt, they have been given ten days to get the Voleware off their machines.
If IBM employees really want to continue using Microsoft Office after that then they will have to get their manager's approval, which within IBM's matrix management culture can be a labouriously daunting task.
Lotus Symphony is an office productivity suite that incorporates huge chunks of customised Open Office. It was developed by IBM in an attempt at luring customers away from Microsoft Office, so it was always a source of embarrassment that the company didn't use the product internally, at least not in Germany.
Big Blue said that 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony. Quite why Germany was behind the rest of the world over the wide scale open sauce introduction was not clear.
Maybe it was only just recently that Symphony became precise enough to satisfy IBM's German workers, or perhaps it needed a special cup holder that could take a stein. µ
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Not surprising they did something similar with OS2.
But really this is just another reason why no one should outsource to IBM. When you ask why consider now on a daily basis IBM employees wont be using applications the rest of the world uses.
I would only outsource to companies that use something similar to what we have internally in our organization than to a company that uses brand X applications. Its like hiring Linux people to manage your Microsoft servers. Sure they can get around but they wont know how to properly support it and do a lot of the basic tasks.
If IBM ever wants to gain the office application acceptance in the real world they should improve symphony to a point that it's easier to use than office 2007 and is more productive. IBM's engineering is pretty good but their ergonomics and user interface design is poor and needs quite a bit of improvement. I prefer Outlook to Notes and it's way more productive than any other e-mail. Thunderbird is good but still lacks quite a bit of feature that Outlook has.
I am writting my thesis on texmaker and doing presentations with OO.org. Spreadsheets? meh... I dont know what that is for.
Going from Office 2007 to Office 2003 there is a night and day difference. Going from Office 2007 to OO is excruciating.
There are so many useful features in O2K7 I couldn't leave it for anything less. It actually makes working on large documents manageable and has personally enabled me to be more productive.
That's right folks. I'm not marketing shit to anyone, but it is that powerful.
And 2010 is just around the corner. Still happy with O2K7, though.
Wonder how long IBM will continue this before their staff complain enough that Office is brought back as an option (which everyone will choose).
wasn't lotus notes the standard back in the early 90s?? also, i thought openoffice was bought up by sun who then made their own suite based on that. none of this would matter really if people weren't stuck on their pretty guis. emacs or vim is good enough for most things except presentations and presentations are a waste of time anyways..
Symphony is a flaming piece of shit. About the only people that support it are IBM folks who work on the product.
As for LordEkim... its the same level as Office 2000 if you are lucky. Its way behind the curve on just about everything else.
It's IBM's last grasp to maintan some type of legacy in the Collaboration workspace as Notes falls further and further behind Exchange...
What are you talking, nearly everything works, only macros as screwed. rest is on same level ore better
I guess they'll have to rewrite all their former M$-format documents. I don't know about Symphony but if its filters are as crappy as OpenOffice ones, their files will appear so messed-up that it would be easer to just rewrite them all.
Even the simpler documents will have to have their margins readjusted because not even that OO is competent enough to recognize. Not even the now ISO-standard XML, which is very embarrassing. They aren't even trying.
Also they would have to reject all non-OO formats from the rest of the world, which are 99.9%
...Sucks. My work gave it to me when I asked for Powerpoint to be installed on my computer. The graphics aren't nearly as polished, and my presentations came out looking like I made them by hand in Microsoft Paint. IBM needs to polish that terd a little more before rolling it out.
Maybe it is because IBM wanted to hold out the conversion in Germany so as to conduct a big compatibility test between Open Office and MS Office, involving that many number of employees.
Maybe its money for own product, yet more likely is undesirable result that microsoft products send goods back to Microsoft thru backdoor ALL Seeing spysoft mechanism.
von drashek