

IBM forcing all employees to stop using MS Office - mgrouchy
http://www.osnews.com/story/22186/IBM_Forcing_All_Employees_to_Stop_Using_Microsoft_Office

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FraaJad
The article is very misleading. I have a family member working at IBM, so let
me clarify.

* No new MS Office Licenses unless approved by the managers.

* Symphony will be the default office suite installed on the Laptops and PCs handed out.

I have seen Lotus Suite (123 etc) installed on recently issued hardware
(2008). Typically they also have MS Office installed alongside. This will now
be replaced by Symphony suite.

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abossy
I recently quit my job at IBM, and there are two more important, albeit
unwritten, tenets:

1) Getting manager approval is next to impossible. A friend of mine that's a
_tech writer_ was unable to obtain one in the time I was there (approximately
a year).

2) The learning curve cost for new users simply exceeds the cost per license.
For high-paying employees, a couple hours learning this stuff will cost them a
couple hours of productivity. Evidently, large corporations don't function
with this in mind.

~~~
jlgosse
I've also done quite a stint at IBM, and I can tell you there is nothing
easier than getting approval for a software license. The max it'll take is 1-2
days for basically anything you want. Obviously your tech writer friend wasn't
too important if he couldn't even get a license for Office. Also, I had a
friend in tech writing, and they didn't use Office; Instead, they used some
sort of XML mark-up for designing documents.

~~~
derwiki
To abossy's point, I know the tech writer in question, and remember the
struggles she had to get a simple piece of software. I don't think it should
matter "how important" she was -- if she needs it to do her job, she should
get it. IBM's policy cost them more in her un-productivity than it saved in
the license cost.

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grammati
All lies. I work at IBM, and I have heard no such thing. As for "330,000 use
Symphony" - everyone gets a computer with Symphony pre-installed. Nobody I
know ever uses it - ever. We all use MS Office, and have not been told to
stop.

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gaius
I can absolutely 100% guarantee even IBM isn't boneheaded enough to tell its
accountants to dump Excel!

~~~
adharmad
Why? In my experience, OO Excel has similar capabilities, although OO probably
trails in the presentation features to powerpoint.

~~~
gaius
Because they'll have vast swathes of rather dodgy VBA, some of it probably has
been patched and tweaked for 20 years, without which they'll be utterly unable
to function, and the risk of porting it straight across is that the SEC comes
and craps all over IBM for not keeping its accounts straight.

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ghshephard
As one who has to deal with incoming (massive) .doc files from customers,
partners and consultants, I'll assure everyone that this "stop using MS
Office" requirement would be impossible.

I have a recent build of NeoOffice (OO packaged for OS X) on my MBP, and while
I'm quite happy using it for casual day-day interaction with small, simpler
Word documents (< 100 pages, < 5 Mbytes) - It's nowhere close to prime time
for reading in larger, complex Word Documents; for any serious integration
with Microsoft, you absolutely, positively, _have_ to have the native
applications on your desktop. And even then it's not a slam dunk if someone
created with a different version of MS Office on a different platform.

And, given that we all have to deal with those documents occasionally (Unlike
me, who has to deal with them every day) - That means Microsoft continues to
sell licenses to people who only use their software to deal with the rare
Microsoft Document that blows up their copy of OO.

Seriously - Pages on the Macintosh (Awesome), or OO is more than enough for
99% of the worlds document creators - the only reason those 99% _need_ to
purchase Microsoft Office anymore is for compatibility.

That's why Microsoft fights standards like ODF tooth and nail - once people
have a choice, they'll make it.

~~~
olefoo
> That's why Microsoft fights standards like ODF tooth and nail - once people
> have a choice, they'll make it.

Which is why beating them in the standards war is important. The business
world can't afford to support monopoly rents at this time. Requiring your
vendors to support ODF and open formats is a first step.

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arfrank
The story is a bit misleading. I can't imagine such a requirement to be met in
only 10 days for over 330,000 employees.

What is more likely is that one division is being required at this time, and
more are to follow. It makes some sense for IBM to have its own office suite
from a business perspective. 330,000 licenses to Office surely adds up and its
just another cost cutting move for IBM

Edit: They also will most likely not force all client facing employees to
switch, as I can foresee compatibility problems.

Edit2: Just checked my machine and I have the full Lotus Symphony suite
installed. Don't know when it got there or how, but its there now along with
most recent Lotus Notes 8

~~~
coliveira
It is more a political move than a cost cutting strategy. They could get
Office from MS for as low as they wanted, if that were the case.

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byoung2
My company just switched to OpenOffice last week. Some people were surprised
to see MS Office missing when they came in.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
How is it working so far? I use it at home and it's more than powerful enough
to meet my modest needs. However, at my work, a lot of legacy applications and
templates are base on Excel with macros; I'm not sure what would be involved
in converting them all to be compatible with OO Calc.

~~~
byoung2
I already used OpenOffice, so it hasn't affected me. No one else seems to mind
it on my floor though, since we're all programmers.

~~~
listic
Do you actually use it much? Do you have to open documents written by others,
in MS Office?

I work for a small engineering and instrument making company. I suggested
trying OpenOffice in a company, it was carefully considered and rejected, and
there are reasons for it:

1\. Some of the documents we get from partners who write them in MS Word just
don't open right. The company can't afford this, period.

2\. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have compound filtering, like MS Excel. I.e. you
filter column by one parameter, then by another. In Excel it is compound
filtering: you select list of parts that satisfies the condition1 AND
condition2, in OpenOffice Calc the condition2 just replaces the condition1.
Maybe it's even more _right_, maybe the behaviour of MS Office is just a
gimmick - I don't know, but the fact is that a guy who manages inventory of
parts in our company came to depend on the functionality of MS Office and
making switch is just impractical.

The version of OpenOffice was 2.4 back then, but I have no reason to expect
that those issues have been fixed since. OpenOffice is a nice project and
helluva work, and open source is cool, but there are reasons why not everyone
can use it.

~~~
gtufano
Point 2. has been long solved. And in ten years using exclusively OOo I have
been hit by point 1 two or three times... The main offenders were the Gartner
spreadsheets with pivot table. OOo calc v.3 opens them, btw...

~~~
listic
Nice to hear that the progress is that steady.

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acg
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818492>

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DanielStraight
I tried to download Symphony. Had to go through like 20 screens and then
couldn't even download it because I had to sign up to use HTTP rather than
their download manager which couldn't get through my proxy. Sigh. Why do
companies think adding steps to a user interface flow is a _good_ thing?

~~~
coliveira
Symphony is just a shell around Open Office, with integration to IBM tools
(such as notes). I don't think is really useful for "normal" people, it is
better just getting OO itself. So, the website it targeted to companies, not
to individual users.

~~~
DanielStraight
Ah. Now it somewhat makes sense. It's still a heck of a lot of clicking.

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jsz0
MS Office is a great suite of software but if you don't actually utilize its
extended feature set there are good alternatives that cost a lot less. I think
more companies will go this route in the future or at least migrate to Office
Online. One of the biggest issues I see with Office is the expense of keeping
a homogeneous environment. Every company I've worked for seems to have at
least 3 different versions of MS Office at any given time. Sometimes more. We
have a decade span -- Office 97 to Office 2007. That presents a lot of support
challenges. With a cheaper, or free, product you can always keep people on a
standard version. I find the variation in Office versions with radically
different UIs (2k to 07 for example) makes switching to an alternative a bit
easier. People have learned to hunt & seek for features so if something is in
a slightly different spot in OpenOffice it's not a big deal.

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jlgosse
They've already started giving new hires and co-ops Lotus Symphony over
Microsoft Office. The good thing about Symphony over other options is the
tight integration with collaboration tools (TeamRoom, Jazz) and email (Notes).

That being said, if there's a customer with an issue, or a new grad looking
for a job, and they use Word as their default word processor, then there's
always Microsoft's Word _Viewer_ which lets employees view Word files.

In my opinion, people need to stop making such a big deal out of this. From
what I've seen, no one is really upset about the change, and it's definitely
saving the company a lot of money. So if employees don't care, and
shareholders are happy, why does it matter?

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acangiano
_staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony_

Nope.

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known
I think IBM employees can still use MS Office Web Apps
[http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/archive/2009/09/17/98964...](http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/archive/2009/09/17/9896401.aspx)

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smokey_the_bear
I interned at IBM in 2002 and didn't have Office on my computer. I spent a
whole day trying to format and print my resume in Lotus Notes for their
internal career fair.

