In 1999, Sun took over German company StarDivision,
whose StarOffice software had built up a base of around four
million Unix and Windows users since the late 1980s.
Sun open-sourced the code in 1990, launching the
OpenOffice.org project
with the aim of creating a community-based, international office
suite, able to run on all major platforms and access all
functionality and data using open application programming
interfaces and XML.
Sun's motivation was also to undermine Microsoft Office, which
eight years on is still the choice of more than 95% of the world's
users, most of whom have never considered the alternatives.
Sun remains the primary sponsor and code contributor to
OpenOffice.org, regularly freezing the code, enhancing it, and
releasing it as StarOffice (currently at version 8). Other major
contributors are Novell, Google, Chinese company RedFlag, and
IBM, which recently revived the 1980s office software brand
Lotus Symphony, based on OpenOffice.org code, and integrated it
with Lotus Notes.
Sun charges a modest licence fee for StarOffice, but
OpenOffice.org is free to download, copy and distribute. It offers
equivalents to most of the major components of Microsoft Office:
Writer (Word), Calc (Excel), Impress (Powerpoint) and Base
(Access), plus a vector graphics editor, Draw (Visio). There is a
growing suite of extension packages, some of which plug
functionality gaps between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. Sun
has contributed several extensions, including a document template
pack, report generator and "presentation minimiser", which can be
used to compress Powerpoint and Impress slides.
Support for Microsoft file formats
OpenOffice.org claims to support most Microsoft file formats,
including Office Open XML, and some legacy formats which recent
versions of Microsoft Office no longer handle. OpenOffice.org led
the development of the ISO standard
ODF (Open Document Format), which Microsoft has pledged to
support in Office 2007.
"From an enterprise point of view, the show moved on years ago
from document formats to the services added behind Office, like
Sharepoint," says Laurent Lachal, open source research director at
analyst firm Ovum. "Formats are more of an issue for the consumer
market. If you save in ODF and send the document to someone with
Office 2003, they are not going to be able to open it."
Lachal adds that a major OpenOffice.org shortcoming is the lack
of an Outlook equivalent - a gap that should be filled with the
addition of the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail and news client and
Lightning calendaring in the forthcoming OpenOffice.org version
3.
Tony Leggatt, IT manager at conservation organisation BirdLife
International, says formats are an issue among the BirdLife
partnership, which includes 112 national conservation organisations
around the world, all autonomous, and many lacking the resources to
upgrade their IT infrastructures to current versions. He is also
concerned about the training implications within a large, dispersed
organisation.
But Lachal points out that the move to
Microsoft Office 2007 involves substantial retraining too, even
though most people will not be doing anything they were not already
doing with Office 2003.
Microsoft's own promotional material makes the transition sound
daunting: "Information workers can easily determine which products
are best for their needs and find related productivity resources -
whether it is assistance from one of the nearly 50,000 new help
articles, a how-to refresher through one of the 35 new demos,
online training through any of the 24 new courses, downloading one
of the more than 400 new templates"
Will users save money by moving to OpenOffice.org? Leggatt says
not - as a charity, his organisation gets a concessionary rate from
Microsoft, and the organisation's in-house and outsourced expertise
is primarily with Microsoft technologies, reducing the time spent
on support calls.
Cost savings
However, for enterprises Lachal says there are definitely cost
savings. "The key strength of both OpenOffice and
Google Apps is cost." And while the key weakness of Google Apps
is functionality, he says OpenOffice is maturing nicely.
The UK is trailing other parts of Europe (not to mention Asia)
in its takeup of OpenOffice, despite pioneering implementations
like
Bristol City Counciland online travel agent Travel
Republic.
A search for OpenOffice on the European Commission's
e-government interoperability website provides
public sector case studies continent-wide, from Ogre in Latvia to
Zaragoza in Spain. The French are steaming ahead at both regional
and national government level the gendarmerie moved to
OpenOffice.org several years ago, as part of a move to open source
which is said to be saving €7m a year. ODF is a government standard
in many European countries, and the European Commission is said to
be looking sceptically at Microsoft's promise to support it.
Ironically, by striving to overcome the inertia and the sense of
devil-you-know security that keeps most users with Microsoft
Office, OpenOffice.org may be fighting last year's battle. In fact,
too close an identification with Microsoft Office means
OpenOffice.org risks becoming associated with an obsolete IT model,
as attention moves to online applications and "the
cloud", where deployment and version compatibility problems are
a thing of the past - as long as your connection holds and your
browser behaves itself. This would be unfair to OpenOffice.org,
which is already available online as part of the Ulteo
Virtual Desktop. Other major OpenOffice.org suppliers will
follow as they square up to the challenge of Google Apps.