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5000 OpenOffice.org Seats for Singapore Government 19

Posted by timothy from the just-gimme-a-few-dozen dept.
kurtz_tan writes "This story on Linux World says the Singapore Ministry of Defence (Mindef) has installed the OpenOffice productivity suite on 5,000 new desktop computers. This move is aimed at giving employees in the ministry an additional choice in productivity software. It will also help Mindef make 'significant' savings in terms of capital costs. Singapore is acknowledged as the second best world wide for e-Government. Hope all other world wide government follow suit."
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5000 OpenOffice.org Seats for Singapore Government More

5000 OpenOffice.org Seats for Singapore Government

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  • Am I the Only One... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sepluv ( 641107 ) <blakesleyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @08:28AM (#10564249)
    I'm not trolling and I'm sure OO.o us useful in getting MS-Office lovers weaned off that to something that is at least free software.

    However, am I the only one that things--however great the work done on it--OO.o is just a bad imitation of MS Office with all the lack of usability included (but,that, like all imitations, doesn't work quite as well as the original).

    Does anyone here use really OO.o a lot and/or prefer it to say LaTeX (or other typesetting systems), Abiword (which at least used to import MSWord better than OO.o) or Scribus. It seems to me that OO.o not only copies all the worst bit of the word-processing model, but all the worst bits of the notorious MSWord sub-model.

    Anyway, it is really good to see that governments are getting the message that it is worng for them to use proproetary software (especially to store gov. data), or at least they are getting the message that free software is cheaper and more reliable.

    • Re:Am I the Only One... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Knights who say 'INT ( 708612 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @08:47AM (#10564417) Journal
      It isn't, precisely because it's an inferior version of what is already available.

      It gives people the general idea that open source = inferior.

      While I'm not particularly fond of word processors either, MS Office is a great productivity suite that gets things done in minutes.

      (I love the smell of karma in the morning) It's NOT "wrong" to use proprietary software, specially if data is released to the general public in more open (CSV/RTF/HTML) formats. I mean, time _is_ money, you know.

      • Re:Am I the Only One... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 0x20 ( 546659 )
        Nobody ever said it was 'wrong' to use proprietary software. What is wrong is to do what Microsoft does, which is to use bullying, cheating, lying, strongarming, and monopolization as regular business strategies. And it's even more wrong done on such a large scale. Which makes it 'right,' in a way, to refuse to support them.

        This is why governments are turning away from MS to open source and Free software. Not just because of the initial cash savings, but because they know they won't be at the mercy of Micr
        • >>don't bitch and...<<

          I was not arguing that it needs more features or that it is not as polished as MS Office or the other free-software alternatives (althought it probably isn't but give them a chance). Instead I was hypothesising that, however good MS Office and OO.o are at what they do, what they do (at least in the word-processing dept, but, also, arguably, elsewhere) is not really very useful or efficient for applications as opposed to alternatives. That is MS-Office style "office suite

    • Re:Am I the Only One... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tclark ( 140640 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @08:56AM (#10564497) Homepage
      First, you can't really compare OOo to LaTeX or Scribus - different functions. Abiword is a very nice word processor, but OOo is a full office package, so the comparison there is weak too. If you only need a word processor, then Abiword is a fine choice. I hope that Abiword and OOo Writer get cross-compatibility soon.

      I prefer OOo to MS Office. OOo runs on all the computers in my office, MS Office does not. OOo file formats are easier to work with than MS Office formats. Finally, I have found the style properties in OOo writer to be more intuitive than those in MS Word.

      YMMV
      • Different functions (whatever that means) maybe...but same RL applications. What applications do you, for instance, use OO.o writer for?
        • I use LaTex for typesetting, especially for material with a lot of mathematical notation. I use Scribus for DTP. I use a bottle opener to open beers. OOo is not a good choice for any of those functions, but that is not a shortcoming of OOo. I use OOo Writer as a word processor.
    • I use OpenOffice.org, LaTeX and text files, all for different purposes. I cannot agree that OpenOffice is an "inferior clone" of MS Office; in particular, its handling of large documents with lots of images is more reliable and predictable. I also like the fact that I can use something like OODoc [cpan.org], a Perl library to manipulate OpenOffice documents. For a book I wrote, I wrote a mini-script to convert between LaTeX and OOo. The fact that OOo files are just ZIPs with XML and images really comes in handy.

      It's

    • I wouldn't exactly call it a bad imitation of MS Office. For light Word, Excel or Powerpoint usage, most users in my experience can barely tell the difference. And light usage (an occasional report, paper or presentation) is exactly what most people use an Office suite for. I've converted my entire family and most of my non-geeky friends from MS Office to OO.o, and not one of them has had a single complaint.
    • There are a lot of technical reasons to go with OOo, especially the word processor which handles styles and large documents better than the current market leader. The open file format alone counts for a lot.

      However, perhaps the biggest reason is that the menus in OOo are flexible. This is one big technical advantage could really exploit some usability studies. It would also be possible, at least in theory, to have a training wheels mode for recovering MSO users, just like many other packages used to

    • I am an ex power user of M$ office. My background started doing rather large spreadsheets to do energy management analysis of large complexes back in 91. I originally started with Lotus 123. The time that Lotus 123 saved me was outstanding, but when I was exposed to Excel, I was quickly converted. With built in wysiwyg it was an easy sell. I have used Excel to do many operations in the energy engineering sector for some time. Having coded applications that still live today in VBA I have a pretty good perspe

  • After years of dabbling with Microsoft Office Suite products, a drastic change will leave some end-users grasping for help. They will probably have to adapt to the new GUi and the new stylesheets ect.

    Is OpenOffice really for everybody?

    What can we do to make others realise that non-proprietary products are the way to go in the future?
  • I've used OpenOffice at school, its really good, one of my ICT teachers said that they were using the spreadsheet part for a few days before even realising it wasnt Excel. I think that Open Office is good for those who dont want to pay loads for new Microsoft software (eg. me)

    The only downside with OpenOffice is this: I cant remember what file types you can and cant save it as, but most computers have some version of MS Word on them and the native OO file format doesn't run Word as far as I'm aware, otherw

  • Why one company switched back to MS Office (Score:3, Informative)

    by jgoemat ( 565882 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @11:18AM (#10566242)
    A company I worked at decided to switch at least some users to Open Office. Saving $300 * 40 licenses seemed like a good idea. Then someone opened a document from an executive and saw some rather embarrassing comments an executive wrote in MS Word but deleted. Well, MS Word doesn't really delete them, they stay in the document. Open Office displayed them to other people and the executive was none too happy. No more Open Office.

    I imagine this little "bug" was probably intentional on M$'s part...

  • Who's the best e-gov? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by davegaramond ( 632107 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @11:26AM (#10566359)
    Okay, this begs the question. If Singapore is the second best, who's the first. (Also, who's 3rd, 4th, and 5th)?

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