Heard from my friends back at NEDA (where I used to work): their IT department is encouraging everyone to make the switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.Org. This is to lighten the financial requirements of having to renew the the Agency’s Microsoft Office 2003 site license. Pretty soon, NEDA ITCS hopes to run the entire office on FOSS, at least in the office/productivity suite realm.
I do hope this activity is sustainable. If successful, then NEDA may serve as a model for government agencies going FOSS. If not with the entire system (including Operating system), then at least we can start with the other–usually more expensive–software packages.
There will undoubdtedly be resistance to this move, especially for those who are unwilling to undertake some adjustments. But as they say, resistance is futile … you will be assimilated!
7 comments
Yucch! There is a reason Microsoft still rules the desktop. OpenOffice is one of them. What we really need is for Pinoys to create their own, unbloated software to replace what’s available. How hard could that be?
I am betting they already downloaded Open Office 2.0, which seems more robust and less bloated than the first version.
OOo2 is pretty light… Then there’s Abiword. It saves doc files anyway… But of course, if they have other needs OOo would still be better.
Yes, they’ve already downloaded oOo 2.0. But in my experience, it still eats up more resources than MS Office apps. 🙁
Yeah, that’s the point. It’s still bloated.
Now that Google has partnered with Sun, I think you’ll see a better OpenOffice release starting 3.0
One of the reasons why OOo2 may be bloated is because it’s built to be platform independent. It should run on any OS (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc). The reason why MS Office is more tuned than OOo2 is because it uses DLLs to take advantage of Windows performance tools (but take note this may not be the only difference). To be platform independent, OOo2 shouldn’t use these.
One good thing though is that OOo2 is more tuned than the previous versions. Better still for the next version (e.g. OOo3) as development continues.
Once the performance issues gets tuned, we may win you guys over 🙂