Productivity Tools

Lions and Tigers, and bears - oh my….Well, at least Writer and Impress and Calc - oh no. Computers were of course, originally developed to manage numerical manipulation according to a described methodology (a program). Along the way, the industry naturally realised that the same tools could also manipulate a great deal of other information - dates, for instance, words for another. Most people, in their work, need to perform a number of tasks that are common to many jobs. Communication is one of those things. Calculation is another. Forecasting the future is yet another. These things are often not directly beneficial to accomplishing a specific task, and so they form a kind of “overhead” on the task itself. Unclear isn’t it…

Let’s try an example. Suppose that I am a bartender. My job is actually to prepare and serve cocktails for customers. Really - that is it. The more drinks I make, the more productive I am, and the less per drink that it costs the owner. The owner has a vested interest in keeping my efficiency high. Then, one day, a bad thing happened. The government decided that it wanted to collect taxes - not just taxes on the operation’s income, but also on the sale price of every drink I served. Now, as a bartender, I have to write down every drink that I sell, along with the price. This is called record keeping, and if I do not do this, the sales tax people are going to be very unhappy with me.

If I have a computer, not only can I use a Point of Sale system, I can have it print a cash-out report, and I can have it tell me exactly how many of each kind of drink I served, what ingredients I should have consumed, and so what to buy to replace the inventory. The upshot is that I can make a lot more drinks because my time is not spent communicating, reporting, managing data, calculating and so on. My productivity is much higher.

There is a common grouping of software tools that are used frequently by people who work in office environments - and of course, not just in offices, but also on shop floors, in cars, on work sites, and at home and school. This grouping is called a productivity suite.
The most common tools are

• word processing
• spreadsheets
• presentation programs
• and less common, but in the same group are
• drawing programs
• project management software
• database programs

Of course, there are also those standard programs in an internet age of web browsers, and e-mail clients.

Standard Suites

There was a time when office productivity tools were not part of a suite. Back in the days of the DOS hegemony, the most popular spreadsheet program was Lotus 1-2-3, and the preferred word processor was WordPerfect. The problem was that when you wanted to exchange data between the two programs, there was no way to get spreadsheet data out of Lotus, and into the cover report in WordPerfect. Eventually, stand-alone solutions such as these gave way to the Microsoft Office Suite - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, MSProject, Paint, IE, and Outlook Express.

Today, of course, this is the dominant productivity suite available, although Corel also bundles its own Office Suite.

The other Office suite that is gaining market share competes directly with Microsoft, feature for feature. It competes dramatically on price, but also on philosophy. Microsoft would really be hard pressed to compete with this product on price, since it is free. Free as in beer, free as in open for inspection.

It too has a word processor - Writer, and a spreadsheet platform (Calc), and a presentation program - Impress, and a drawing program - (Draw), and a database (Base). Its cousins in the Open Source movement provide a browser (Firefox) and an e-mail client (Thunderbird), and a full fledged relational database - (MySQL).

If you add a few utilities to that, like an archiving program (7Zip), and there is little need for dependency on Microsoft.

Who’s behind Open Office ?

Launched by Sun originally, now IBM has joined in to collaborate.

Compatibility

In the past, there were clear and sharp dividing lines between parts of the computing world. Apple users, for instance, had extreme difficulty exchanging data with anyone who used a PC, since not only was the distribution of files nearly impossible, but the file formats were different. Macs could not read PC files and vice versa. (effectively could not, for most users…, anyway).

Now we have three competing suites mentioned above in the PC productivity suite marketplace - Microsoft, Corel and OO. They do not have the same file distribution problem since all run on PCs and use the same diskettes (if you still have one at all), the same CD formats, the same USB key access, and are connected if not by the same LAN, then at least by the internet.

On the other problem - file formats, there has been a less happy situation. Microsoft has long used proprietary file structures and formats, that, in effect, encouraged users to adopt their software so as to be assured that files and data could be exchanged. This has been particularly true of the institutional sectors, such as education and government. Large businesses also, both for standardisation reasons, and for ease and assurance of quality and support, chose Microsoft.

In recent months and years, Microsoft has been encouraged to not only publish their proprietary file structures, but also to adopt and implement compliance with Open Standards for such file structures. This means that files can be >almost< seamlessly exchanged between Microsoft and OO installed systems. Almost.

Microsoft is finding it necessary to provide file structure conversion tools.

In addition, the functionality and user interface of the main components of these two suites is so nearly identical that any user trained on Microsoft Word, can with confidence sit down at OO Writer, and immediately be productive.

If this is the case - why would anyone pay money to Microsoft for their productivity suite? Well as mentioned a few lines up - there is the question in large offices of standardising on a solution that is backed by a support program. Further, if that size of operation also is running Microsoft back of the house (SQL server, web servers and LAN software) it probably makes some sense to bundle all of it together, and hand it all to one vendor.

Which finally brings us around to the issue. If you are not the government, and not General Motors - why would you bother? Licensing for Microsoft products can run into a lot of money. For those who believe that that money is better spent on assets that generate revenue directly, or that improve productivity directly, the expenditure - if it can be avoided - makes no sense.

This is a migration guide, discussing differences between Microsoft and OO.

Open Office Decision Evaluation

We have discussed the considerations that go into making a decision about implementing an Open Source software platform. Broadly speaking the questions are vendor qualification, product qualification, costs, risks, and impact. Let’s turn to those now.

How long has the project been around ?

The predecessor software was written by Star Division of Germany from 1985 through 1999. Sun Microsystems acquired the software, and began the Open Office project in June of 2000. The code was publicly released in October of 2000. The first release of Open Office was distributed in January of 2001.

The sponsors.

The founding sponsor is Sun Microsystems. They continue to contribute senior SUN staff to both act as technical project leads on some of the core subprojects, but also exercise some oversight in the Community Council. There are other contributing sponsors, including Novell. Recently, IBM has joined the project, as well, contributing some 38 of its technical staff to work on aspects of the project.

Project Lead and Development Team

The umbrella Open Office is organised as a number of core subprojects, including the Writer project, the Calc project, the ODF open document standard project, and several others. Each has a technical project lead. There is a technical council made up of these project leads. Amongst these are Bauer, Hollmichel, and Hutsch (all of SUN). The project leads and their projects can be found here. Of the 24 or so leads responsible for product development, 19 have SUN e-mail addresses, one is from Mac, and several have openoffice.org addresses.

All of the project leads are experienced professional developers.

The development infrastructure, coding guides, and release engineering standards are all published and open to review.

Quality Standards

It is not apparent that Open Office participates in any of the formal process standards for software (ISO, CMM), however, Open Source is itself a form of quality standard, focused on extensive peer review. Here is a sitemap for the QA subproject. Examples of results from their Test Case Management system can be seen here, and the various subprojects publish their test case specifications.

Two of the co-leads of the QA subproject are interviewed here, and disclose their training and length of experience. NAKATA, Maho Caio Tiago Oliveira de Sousa

You can query the Issue tracking system for defects, enhancements, and patches. Build details and status reports are available.

Bug History and Response

The bug history is publicly available, anyone can report a bug, and anyone can track defects, enhancements, patches and so on. Responses vary with the severity of the issue, with significant or “showstopper” bugs being handled immediately. Other bugs, which often actually contain desired enhancements or improvements, undergo a review process to consider the impact of making such changes.

Support

The common complaint about Open Source Software is that there is poor support compared to their competitive commercial offerings. There is some truth to this, if you define support as ‘I can call someone right now, and get my problem fixed’. Of course, anyone with experience with commercial vendor software knows that that is rarely true of them, either. It is either your fault, or some other vendor’s fault, or your operating system is corrupt, or your hardware is broken, or… You pay your money, you takes your chances.

Ahh, how about you don’t pay your money, and take your chances with the extensive range of on-line facilities Open Office has. Then if all else fails, you can pay some money to a 3rd party support operation.

Open Office’s main support page

There are manuals, how-to guides, Frequently Asked Questions, mailing lists to which you can subscribe, discussion boards - and another one, tutorials, tutorials using pictures, more tutorials in HTML pages, tutorials using video clips, and books - free and otherwise.

If all else fails, you can either contact a 3rd party support operation, or access the source code and read it (well, just joking on that last - doubt you would want to do that…).

Open Standards ?

Open Office has pioneered and promoted a standard for document distribution and publishing called ODF, which has been approved and published by the ISO (The International Standards Organisation). The project for the ODF standard is not just for Open Office, but interacts with the use of ODF by anyone. In addition, Open Office supports and integrates with other standard distribution formats, proprietary and otherwise.

Reputation in Development Community

This is the awards page for Open Office. Included amongst these awards is this commendation from IT Reviews as of June 2007, saying “This is quite simply incredibly well featured for a free download “.

Who has Implemented

The acid test is an assessment of who is using the software. This is a little difficult to establish. Most commercial entities are able to tell how many copies they have sold, because they have an invoice. Of course, they cannot always estimate how many pirated copies might also be in use. Open Office has no invoices. Not only that, they distribute via download from their main site, but this suite is also bundled into many Linux distributions, is distributed on CD, copied from one user system to another, and otherwise mysteriously migrated. So, it is a bit unclear.

Having said that, Open Office reports that the number of downloads from their site is in excess of 100 million since project inception. They also know who some of the major organisational users are. Amongst those is Novell, with in excess of 5,000 seats running Open Office (which is probably why they are also contributing sponsors). And of course Sun Microsystems themselves run more than 30,000 seats. Adoption in Europe far outstrips adoption in North America, with France’s government ministries running some 300,000 seats, with a further 175,000 in the capital regional governments. Spain is running some 385,000 seats in government and education. Brazil runs 85,000 seats and even Vietnam runs 20,000 seats.

North Americans just enjoy paying money, it would seem. However, there is greater penetration in the small business market according to an IT-Director reader survey. Microsoft has been viewed dubiously by small business for some time now. Things have changed since 2003. As Open Office matures and is both more compatible and certainly more competitive with Microsoft Office, perhaps the time has come for a look.

Are eWeek, CFO.com, Orlando Sentinel, and even Baltimore’s college paper the Towerlight wrong? Nope.

Decision Analysis

This is a software suite that is 7 years old, staffed by Sun Microsystems professionals, with additional contributions from Novell and IBM, as well as independents. They have pioneered and established a major open standard for document publishing with the ISO, and their development and QA processes and documentation are wide open to visibility. They have demonstrated a strong record of responsive feature development and bug fixing. They have a very strong reputation with the development community, and the install base includes more than 600,000 government users, 100,000 private sector seats in major organisations, and it is distributed with virtually every Linux distribution. There is very good compatibility with Microsoft Office, both in files and in functionality, so conversion and training costs are minimal.

Support is offered in at least five different on-line forms, and 3rd party support is available on a fee basis, if absolutely required.

Decision : Implement it.