sidneymcguir821's Journal

Can certainly OpenOffice escape from within a cloud

Like many OpenOffice! org adopters, Forrester's enterprise clients tend to be starting to wonder what are you doing with the once-promising open source replacement for access 2007! As one chief technology strategist posited a week ago: "Oracle has made many strong public pronouncements in which their support for microsoft access 2007. org will continue abated! This, however, begs the question in the increasing functional and technological gap between standard software programs like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations and the modern, all-encompassing view of the actual desktop being adopted simply by Microsoft in Office 2010! That being so, is there really any kind of future for microsoft access 2007 download/OpenOffice. org within the enterprise, except as an ever-shrinking niche to compliment basic, ultra low-cost office file capability on home-use platforms? "

Great question! After 10 years, OpenOffice hasn't had much traction inside enterprise - supported by simply under 10% of firms, and today it's struggling with more competition from on-line apps from Google in addition to Zoho! I'm not counting OpenOffice totally out yet, however, since IBM has already been making good progress with features with Symphony and Oracle is positioning OpenOffice for that web, desktop and mobile-a primary! But barriers to OpenOffice as well as Web-based tools persist, and not just using a feature/function basis! Common barriers include:

Third-party integration requirements! Some applications only use Office! For example, one financial services agency I spoke with was forced to retain Place of work because its employees needed to cooperate with Fiserv, a proprietary data center that may be very Microsoft centric! "What was working pretty well was karate chopped! " Another firm explained out OpenOffice. org to 7, 000 users and needed to revert back 5, 000 of them when they discovered one of the primary apps they work with only supported Microsoft!

With all of these types of barriers it's no wonder OpenOffice isn't better symbolized in enterprises! But there is expect: IBM/Lotus has been investing more heavily in past times few years in its Lotus Symphony suite to add advanced features like pivot furniture and better round stumbling with Microsoft Office! It's also slated to get integrated into LotusLive, the online collaboration as well as email platform, and it may turn out to be integrated with IBM's Challenge Vulcan! Similarly, Novell could seek to integrate OpenOffice with Heart beat and Google Wave, but has other potential distractions having its imminent sale! Oracle isn't offering a lot detail on its options for OpenOffice. org, but I expect to see news by midyear! Oracle has committed to making the primary industry OpenOffice solution available on-line, desktop, and mobile though has offered insufficient time lines! This would be a huge step forward if it delivers within this promise!

The code bases intended for Lotus, Novell, and Oracle/Sun are additionally slated to synch this coming year, which will help provide more unity relating to the OpenOffice versions, though there's still division since IBM's version is usually Eclipse-based!

So, if IBM, Novell, and Oracle can successfully integrate OpenOffice in collaboration and content operations solutions, OpenOffice could see sunny days ahead since it becomes blended with the details Workplace experience of these kinds of vendors! This suggests OpenOffice is prone to make its way into enterprises surreptitiously than as being a conscious choice for a low-cost alternative tool set! So, yes, I do see an upcoming for OpenOffice in the enterprise - one that's closely associated with integration with collaboration, content management, and business processes and facilitated by brand names Oracle and IBM! But even then, it likely serves still to be a complement to Microsoft Place of work, not a replacement for the people 20-30% of iWorkers needing the richer capabilities of Microsoft Office for that foreseeable future!