I would like to see someone convert a large company from Office to OpenOffice. Would go over too well I bet.

Oh. Can't wait for O2K7 to be the norm. I've been testing it since day one. Its the bee's knees. You'll see...every single person here will be using it in two years.

"It needs a RC1 and RC2 and lots more testing. I like B2TR but it is buggy as hell still."
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I'll echo the "What is the problem???". Got anything specific as far as buggy goes? I'm not having any problems either and I'm putting Office 2007 through its paces.

B2TR is a great leap over the b2, it actually does not slow itself down with sucking up all the memory.
I left outlook running for over an hour and could still use windows without restarting the system.
outlook loads faster than than b2 as well.
Much better, more stable on my system at least and the interface is much better.

God no !!!!!!!!

It needs a RC1 and RC2 and lots more testing. I like B2TR but it is buggy as hell still.

What is the problem??? I have been using it for several weeks (besides issues with Norton) it runs great. I am now using it as my main Office suite

It has these cpu spikes where Outlook freezes up. I've talk to other users over at:

http://forums.microsoft....ID=453607&SiteID=17

Don't know what the problem is, can't seem to pin it down.

I can't comment on Outlook 2007 bcos I can't use it side by side with my current Outlook 2003.

However, the other apps in the suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) are pretty stable, even for a Beta.

I'm running it with the update. It doesn't seem buggy to me at all.

I'm a senior IT manager in a fairly large company with conacts in quite a few other larger firms. I don't know anyone that has any plans to adopt this anytime soon. It's going to be a *very* tough sell in the corporate world. So will Vista, but that's another story.

The only reason we continue using O2k3 is due to file compatability with govt customers. OO simply will not do. I wish it would though. If it provided 100% compatable results, we'd have switched long ago.

I believe PowerPoint 2007 itself is enough to convince many corporate clients to upgrade. The new features are real time savers. Not to mention they look soooo... pretty.

And Excel 2007 now has unlimited rows. It also has KPI tools. This ought to attract at least a few customers.

"Excel 2007 now has unlimited rows. It also has KPI tools. This ought to attract at least a few customers."

That's great to know. That will make me upgrade in a heartbeat. Hate to have the limitation of 2^16.

Interesting.

We skipped 2003 with the specific intent of going for their next release.

The anecdotal, "I'm not using it, so no-one will' is BS, though. You have 10 that won't, I have 10 that will, and everyone else here has their own ideas of who will and won't.

Claiming it's going to be a tough sell just because *you* aren't going to upgrade or recommend it does not in any way mean *I* won't upgrade or recommend it.

You may be their senior IT manager, but I own the consulting firm they're going to ask. ;)

I welcome any M$ product. But I still refuse to pay for any of it. So, I'm not sure how good of a sell this will be.

how can it go gold this month if its still Beta stage.

tryed it looks pretty to unstable, I give the copper award Microsoft!

Microsoft performs a new build on a weekly basis and then daily as they move forward in the development lifecycle. The Beta 2 TR was probably built sometime in early to mid August, thats 2+ months ago and they have been building new versions almost daily since then. Also, new builds (after the Beta 2 TR) are available to internal MS employees and specific testers. Everything since the Beta 2 release in early May has been focused on bug fixes and not the addition of new features. So, going Gold is certainly possible, and in this case, expected.

399 for standard edition? Holy crap! Now I will admit, office 2007 is an improvement over 2003. The style and feel of it is pretty nice in the last beta build available for download. But I can't see dishing out that kind of money AND then be expected to dish out at least several hundred dollars for vista. I mean why is the BASIC copy of office more expensive then the OPERATING SYSTEM unless of course your talking about ultimate edition of vista, then your paying almost a grand for a copy of office and windows vista! What kind of crap is that.

This is exactly the problem you get when you have a single company having all the success. Are they going to blame these outrageous prices on pirating? If they sold a few million more copies they might drop the price a few hundred dollars? I doubt it that would just make them say hey! were making so much money lets jack up the price more! It's obviously not high enough we are still selling sooo many copies. When demand goes down, just like gasoline we know we are too high. Basic economics in action there.

The sad thing is, no one knows open office.org exists. The knowledge is just not out there in the general public. Word of mouth is the only way the word is spreading. I mean a basic example I was at costco, someone asked if a laptop had office on it, I mentioned you can get a free copy of openoffice.org for free. Their eyes lit up and said HUH? So point is if everyone told their friends and family about it, I can guarantee microsoft's sales would drop and office would be more affordable.

The home edition (no longer just academic) is essentially the same as the standard except that you get OneNote instead of Outlook costs $149 and can be installed on up to three machines (if the licensing restrictions are the same as Office 2003). The only people who would normally look at buying the standard edition are businesses where software prices tend to be higher.

The problem is that M$ want us to pay their bad development, their bad decisions and of course, their lawers.
Long live to Open Office, it's time to switch!

Pricing is not any different then Office 2003

Long Live OpenOffice??? That program acts like office 97

And that's one of the winner points. Maybe Sun could improve a little the GUI, but keep it unbloated should be a must, unlike M$ Office 2000/XP/2003 and now the early alpha 2007 (Microsoft finish the product after several service packs). But every new version is a step backwards in terms of usability. You always need to click more times to perform the same job.. In next version maybe they could remove keyboard shorcuts to make it even more unconfortable to use it. But M$ is consitent at least... For example in Windows Vista you have click to SEE the menu in any program, one additional click for ANY action, and they call it a feature! Quack!

You have got to be kidding. Myself and several businesses I work with find that OpenOffice is missing about 1/2+ features that are found in office 2000 and Office 2003. Open Office is barly useable. The program would be fine if we were in 1998. But in 2006, 2007 it is antiquated.

If your talkign about advanced features yes. But the point is, all office versions have 95 percent of the features going to waste. Heck most people don't even know they exist. I am sure 2007 added hundreds more. But the simple fact is most people type their school paper do a spell check and send it off. The average student doesn't need it and openoffice suite being saved as a .doc will work just fine for them and best of all its free. Will it work for a company that using the advanced features of microsoft office? No of course not, its free you idot!

so with that in mind microsoft is changing formats anyway. The days of 3rd party compatibilty is over with .doc there is a new file extention starting there and will be sure to phase out previous versions of office usefullness and will sure destroy any open source. Either that or it will help expand opensource versions.

Check out www.thinkfree.com and www.writely.com

My friends that are still in school have used OpenOffice to type documents. Taking a basic document in Word and trying to read in in OpenOffice (ha) the formating was messed up, the page size was messed up. If open office could not even do basic stuff, then free is just going to waste time and make people mad (like myself). I turned my back on open source a long time ago when they said their software was better, when in reality is was worse. MSFT new format is open and can be edited so programers can make their open typing program.

"No of course not, its free you idot!" Free is not always better

Have you tried Office 2007? it's such a cool suite of apps. And for a Beta 2, it's relatively stable.

OpenOffice??? This is a bloatware. Trust me. Look at how slow it is and how much RAM it consumes. I was forced to use it for a couple of months. But I gave up and decided to use Office 2007 instead.

I tried Open Office a couple of years ago. At first, I thought it was the berries. Then I started to have all kinds of problems with incompatable file formats, my computer locking up, and lost data.

I switched back to Office 2003 and I'm so glad I did. I've had NO PROBLEMS SINCE! Yes, the cost is "outch!" for a small operation like mine but so was the lost time and frustration with those "free" products.

Another Rushed Product by M$$$$, Expect Security Patches After final Release

Love the way Office 2007 works, but hate the way it looks. The real reason anyone should upgrade to Office 2007 is for the incredible new file formats, .docx and .xlsx, for Word and Excel respectively. Other than that, I don’t see the benefit of shelling out this much money for so little in return. I sincerely hate the new candy-coated, 2nd grader, neon, big-assed icon look of Office 2007. After six months of beta testing, the new user interface has yet to grow on me, and I’m the kind of guy who likes new things!

SoftMaker Office gives you all the power but with none of the bloat and complexity of MS Office, and oh, at about a third of the cost, if not less.

I’m tired of being offered software that I have futz with endlessly just to get to work. There’s a reason why programs like XYplorer File Manager and WinRAR have such devoted users — they let you do the job and get on with your life.

I don't understand why everyone is complaining about the price. You all know that when office comes out there is going to be someone out there to crack it and you all know you will download it off the internet. SO stop comparing office products and talking about price. Openoffice and a great tool and so is Office 2007. Its all about what the user wants. Companies and Organizations will continue to use microsoft office products and then you have the home users who can use both. It will depend on those home users how much they want to spend.

After using OpenOffice and comparing it to Office 2k3 and Office 2k7, I found the office products to be alot better. Not to say that OO isn't a good product, or doesn't do the whole office thing well, just that MS Office does it better. But that may just be me, like most "big" debates on software (ie.OS vs OS or IM vs IM etc) it comes down to preference and how its being applied.

I find OO to be adequate for my purposes, and the price is right too. :)

I'm only even touching Office 2k7 beta because the price for THAT was pretty good too. Plus I needed Visio for a couple of classes.

Since OpenOffice does everything I need it to and doesn't cost me an arm and both legs I think I'll stick with it.

$399 is what you would sell both your legs for?

Since purchasing and using Office 2003 (coming from the OpenOffice project), there is no way I will ever go back. For $399 each workstation, Office is set at a very reasonable price, considering all the spreadsheets/documents I've created with Office - and all the income those reports had generated for my small business (big income) of just a few persons.

"$399 is what you would sell both your legs for?"

umm, not meant to be literal. Guess you missed that huh?

To answer that question I would not sell my legs for $399 just to buy MS Office. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy.

400 bucks is reasonable for software? I hope your not serious.

It seems OpenOffice is a better choice.

For who?

For every human been willing to stay on the legal side without dropping $400 for a crippled product (professional costs $500). You can have 95% of the product for free! And that's a LOT more than what 99.999% of the users needs.
Also, you can open M$ Office documents with Open Office, but not the other way. And many smart companies started using OO.
And, if you work in IT, you can drop Open Office in less than 5 minutes in almost any computer. With M$ Office 2003 you need to reboot and wait at least 15 minutes to see the computer registry grow 10mb for free. Wait, not for free, you also paid at least $400...
I can say Sun Open Office is a win-win deal.

Actually if you work in IT you would have just installed everything once, and made an image.

1) Human beings /= Human been
2) Office at $399 is not crippled in any way.
3) $289 is the cost for Office 2007 Pro Upgrade. The same thing it's been for the past decade.
4) 95% is a gross exaggeration on the basis of OpenOffice's lack of integration with every other product on the market that leverages Office components and any macro-driven document.
5) Considering that most of the world's intellectual property is in Microsoft's Office formats, I don't think too many people are going to be too disappointed about "not being able to open Open Office docs".
6) Open Office does not install in 5 minutes - that's completely untrue. And Microsoft Office doesn't require a reboot on Windows XP.
7) Sun owns StarOffice, not Open Office.
8) Your usage of the $ in M$ leads me to believe you're still in high school, aren't you?

how is it crippled, ok there might be a few things that need patching, but MS is good about that
$400-$500 is not that bad for a brand new office product, also why would you even complain about instalation, 5 min or 15 whats the big deal, and restarting your computer? thats probibly one of te hardest things i have ever done, NOT!
and if you really need those 10mb your computer is not that great sorry to break it to you

1) Right, I'm sorry, english isn't my native lang.
2) Office at $399 hasn't Access, which cripple the product, you need to pay $500 for the complete suite.
3) $289 was expensive 10 years ago, now and the next decade, for an program upgrade.
4) When I say 95% I mean what people really use of the product, not the kind of functions which make MS Office a bloated fatware. Lack of integration with "every other product" is about market share, Open Office improved a lot in last year and is taking market share. I hope it continue that way so integration becomes true for it.
5) Many people should be dissapointed paying $400 for a fatware when you can have the same functions for free. Be aware that OO reduced use is a different thing, since there is not publicity for Open Office other than the mouth to mouth.
6) Did you even try to install Open Office?? In any modern computer you can install it in 5min, if you don't take the time to read the full license agreement and choose not to register (which you should do once).
7) Sun Microsystems founded Open Office community in 2000, continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. But, you are right, Sun doesn't OWN OpenOffice, it just help it, and that's something Microsoft NEVER did for any project, ever!
8) No, I'm not in high school. I use $ in its name because I think Microsoft is one of the darkest companies in the world. They have a LOT of power so they use it to slow computing progress without ethic, just for money. So they deserve to be called worse than that. But I'm a good guy, with good education, so just just add $ to their name as symbol of their wanting, just a symbol to remember what are we talking about. Not a kid thing, but a subtle one. OK?

MS is good patching you say? Mhh, I don't think so. They continue patching IE 6.0sp1 for many years now, and it never finish with it. They released multiple patches that break more than what they fix. Anyway, with crippled I mean that it is not a complete product, it lacks a database manager (Access) which you can use only if you pay $100 more.
15min. of your time and $500 vs. 5min. and $0. That's 300% of your time and well, you can't even put in percentage 500 and 0... If you need to deploy the product in multiple computers 300% of your time is too much, and reboot your computer should be done only with major changes, and really piss me off.
With 10mb, I was talking about the size of the registry which grows at least 10mb when you install M$ Office. Maybe you don't know, but the registry is a vital part of Windows, were almost all configuration is stored. As the registry grows, the performance of your computer go down. I will not explain you the full Windows internals, but I suggest you to read some documentation about it if you want to know how Windows works. 10mb of registry is a LOT when your computer hold it in RAM and have to search on it every second, but the worst thing is that it is unnecessary.

Oh come on, give me a brake...

"They have a LOT of power so they use it to slow computing progress without ethic, just for money."

The most stupid thing I've ever heard. Do you actually believe this? I guess too many X-Files and Conspiracy Theory for you.

And you can't just throw MS Office and install OO.o in 5 minutes. There is a lot more than just install/uninstall work. You need to do a lot of planning, collaboration with your clients, work force training, 3rd party program rewrite, etc. etc. This costs money. A LOT of money. And after you are done, you need to maintain all those installations. With MS Office you have WSUS and SMS services, tell me that you gonna do with 2000 OpenOffice installs needing patches after another version release?

If you would work for IT you should know that.

--
Chears,

OpenSource ex-fanboy
Real world IT manager
Vilius Šumskas