links for 2006-04-12

keithcu says:

April 15, 2006 at 6:30 pm

What features are missing from OpenOffice in your mind? For everyone in my family at least, I believe OO is good enough. I put it on my Dad’s computer and he’s been fine with it for several months…
Balaji says:

April 15, 2006 at 7:12 pm

Hi Keith!

First up – that was a very nice article :). While I’d agree with you that OO is sufficient for most home users, I think in a corporate environment MS-Office has some significant advantages:

1. MS Excel and its BI functionality: A lot of corporate MIS runs on Excel. Once these corporate automate thier MIS using MS-SQL Server BI, its a cinch to move the manual MIS in Excel to plug directly into to the BI platform.

2. Tight integration: Mixing content from Word,Excel into Powerpoint is a cinch. The entire presentation application in OO is a bit weak and this integration isn’t so obvious.

3. Versioning and Workflow: If you are running a MS-Exchange environment, users can easily send documents off for approval with a workflow built in and be assured that all changes are tracked. Sharepoint takes this a notch higher by putting everything on a website.

4. Presentation: Powerpoint is a wonderful presentation application – OO still has a way to go on this.

The inertia of working with MS-Office tends to cause people to buy (and let’s face it – pirate) the same for use at home as well.

What do you think?

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