MS hopes biz punters will guzzle Office 2010 Microsoft has launched the business version of its Office 2010 productivity suite, alongside its all-important sidekick SharePoint 2010. Redmond, which typically launches its tech in waves, won’t make the consumer version of the software generally available until 15 June. The company’s biz division boss, Stephen Elop, kicked …
I think that someone in Redmond accidentally drank hydraulic fluid at the last company beer bash, TBH.
Seriously - I would rather masturbate with a cheese grater than try and emulate Facebook activities in a work environment (I'm the one who has to support all that shit at the back-end, and I find SharePoint to be an over-priced resource hogging headache, so maybe I'm biased here).
The only employees I can see offhand who would even want that would be the ass-kissers, the employees more interested in doing politics than work, that one creepy exec who really doesn't do much during the day beyond surfing dodgy sites in his office, and the terminally brain-dead.
Besides, if the proxy logs are accurate, employees with web access are too busy surfing the real Facebook all day long (yes, I'd love to block it. No, I don't want to have to deal with managerial fallout if I did do it. Best I'm able to do w/o getting lynched is to block anything coming out of Zynga and its ilk).
....not unless Microsoft offer some GENEROUS discounts.
We're currently running Office 2003 where I work, although it appears some previous employee has walked off with the media. Of course Microsoft can't supply an Office 2003 Volume Licence disc anymore and the resellers we bought the licences from haven't got any copies. The solutions? We could either try our luck with a dodgy copy from Piratebay, use the Greek, Turkish or Bulgarian versions or upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010 at a cost of um... around £30,000 (that includes replacing 23 old PCs, upgrading 10 others and installing Windows 7 etc).
Suffice to say, we might be a bit more serious about looking at OpenOffice.
"Microsoft is hoping that biz customers who are shifting to Windows 7 will opt for a total “refresh cycle” and upgrade their MS Office suite at the same time."
OpenOffice can solve this issue for free.
OpenOffice is a great alternative. It works very well with GoogleDocs and Zoho. It's like my Offline Zoho or Google Docs. Very useful when the Internet is slow or not available. In fact, I find it has several features that 'online word processors' don't (& I'm not even a power user) ;)
I also sometimes use Lotus Symphony which I find very helpful.
"Microsoft is hoping that biz customers who are shifting to Windows 7 will opt for a total “refresh cycle” and upgrade their MS Office suite at the same time."
I did. I'm now using OpenOffice on all of my machines instead of the Office 2003 that we were using before. Why should I continue to pay hundreds of dollars to upgrade every time someone in Redmond decides that they need more money? Screw that! It works well enough now.
My company is happy to keep installing 2003, and the users are happy to keep using it.
The "must have" for 2007 seemed to be that everybody needed to be retrained and most macros needed to be rewritten to use it.
The "must have" for 2010 is that you can use it with Facespace ?? WTF!
Not used MS office on my work machine for years, but no one here has noticed. If you want an example of real lock-in try autocad:-
Full autocad >= £3500 each
autocad LT >= £800 each
Both the above "expire" every 2-3 years as they keep changing the file format (see MS)
Bricscad = £300 each. Already switched.
Next computer we buy will have OO on it, and all existing workstations will be upgraded from office2003 to OO3.x
(ps Bricscad has a beta of a native Linux version out now. See where we are going with this?)
Right now the toss-up is between 07 and 10. Not looking forward to it. I expect the conversion to Windows 7 will follow the year after. They are looking seriously at 10 in light of the possibility of eliminating Acrobat purchases. Since we are also in the process of moving to an Exchange environment, I don't expect the Open Office angle will carry much weight.
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