One of the most common oppositions we hear from IT professionals and business managers against shifting away from Microsoft Office is this:
We cannot change away from MS because we are using MS Office in conjunction with this and that application
- How difficult is it to integrate OpenOffice or ODF in an existing business application?
- Do any of you have actual experience doing it?
- How can we exchange knowledge and experiences on this matter?
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3 comments:
There are some ODF libraries to enhance your application :
JAVA & .NET
http://odftoolkit.org
JAVA :
http://jopendocument.org
Python :
http://opendocumentfellowship.com/projects/odfpy
Perl :
http://search.cpan.org/~jmgdoc/OpenOffice-OODoc/
Thanks a lot.
I am more interested in actual customer cases from the real world. Not saying that these tools are not real of cause ;-) - but we desperately need references I think.
Hello!
Unfortunately, negative reference. Our engineering company (around 10 persons) investigated opportunity to switch to Openoffice.org. We don't have IT manager therefore practical approach is to use programs as they are (I think it's true for 99% of non-IT small business).
The first and the main obstacle was lack of integrated replacement for outlook. I'm staying with Netscape, Mozilla and Thunderbird for some 10 years, because it was much more stable in times of msoffice 6.0, but it can't replace outlook.
The next obstacle of a bit less importance is that most of engineering programs are able to export information to excel formats and it usually doesn't work with openoffice.org, because these programs need ms libraries.
But at the end I'm sure, that lack of PIM in openoffice.org is the most confusing thing, even if people doesn't use outlook more than email program.
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