Just a bit of an update on our Open Office 2.0 exploration. A user just sent me her most troublesome document that crashed the OO 2 beta in Windows.
It was the Survey of Divisions from the commonwealth. 47 pages of MS Word forms with Macros. I'm using the release ver of OO 2 on Ubuntu 5.10. It's getting better. OO gave me the warning about Macros & I selected enable. It took 5 minutes to open, but was fine and editable including all form elements. I made a couple of minor edits and saved to a new file which only took a few seconds. I then made more extensive edits and hit save. 15 minutes later it's still working on it. Using 90% CPU and 600mb RAM. So the compatibility with MS is better, but hopefully there will be some optimisation for MS forms and macros. We could probably use it now. Documents that are a problem would be pretty rare. We do have either Office XP or 2003 licenses for every PC at the moment. Some users hate me throwing new software at them even when it is more functional. Our staff member who is least comfortable with PCs and change is one of our test users for Zimbra email. He seems a bit miffed and is suffering from Outlook withdrawal. This user also makes comments about free software wouldn't be as good since MS is so big with lots of money :) I am going to switch all of our users to Zimbra in a future release after a couple of the bugs are fixed and features added (like sensible distribution lists) This will probably happen in the first few months of next year. For Office, new staff and/or PCs will probably start with open office & I'll consider switching the other users to a later version of OO. I've got my own license of win 2000 server with 10 CALs that I'm not using that I might donate to the division. If we get the rare doc that is trashed in OO, a user can open it from their network share through a terminal session as an interim solution. Regards, Neil McAliece IM/IT Manager Murrumbidgee Division of General Practice Ph (02) 6953 6454 Fax (02) 6953 6653 web www.mdgp.net.au email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: Neil D. McAliece <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Greg Twyford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], General Practice Computing Group Talk <[email protected]> Sent: Tue 29 Nov 2005 16:52:51 EST Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] OpenOffice 2.0 I've been using OO almost exclusively on Ubuntu at the office for about 12 months (maybe more). It has been fine most of the time. One of the users who trialed OO 2 beta for me had the most trouble with a couple of documents and spreadsheets that came from the dept of Health (I think). I might ask her to try some of the problem docs with the release version of OO 2 (if she can rememeber what they were). I'm about to blow away my dual boot install of WinXP and Ubuntu Warty. Will install Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) which includes OO 2 packages. I've been using VMware for windows for a while. I just tried the new 5.5 release and it is a dream. Sound bugs are gone, it's faster and it now installs on Breezy without workarounds. I'll keep reviewing Open Office. I would like to be able to switch before users start pressing for newer versions of MS Office. (Hopefully a while off yet). Also our last lot of Office 2003 licenses were OEM, so I would like a replacement solution before we look at changing hardware again (hopefully also a while off). Zimbra should do us nicely with just the free Open Source release. If there are any diehard Outlook users then they won't have the shared folders and calendars (should be possible with the network version). Should be an incentive to switch. Shared folders haven't made it into the current beta, but are coming apparently. The network version (the one that is $28 per year per user) includes live backup and per user restore. No doubt someone will come up with something for the open source release. At the moment the procedure for backing up is to stop services, back up MySQL, then backup /opt/zimbra The Zimbra people have cautioned that backing up the open source release has live has the risk of getting the server components out of sync (apparently a bad thing). The problem with that is that the mta will be offline while the backup runs. I think this will result in delayed rather than bounced mail, but I should check that. Our mail volume is almost all spam in the early hours of the morning. Neil ----- Original Message ----- From: Greg Twyford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], General Practice Computing Group Talk <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, 29 November 2005 4:08:57 PM Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] OpenOffice 2.0 Neil, I've been using OOo versions 1.1.3 and 1.1.4 over the past two years for the majority of documents I have created in the Division. Now I'm using OOo 2.0 with sheer joy. I agree with the issues relating to some documents, but since moving to OOo 2.0 ten days ago I haven't seen any significant formatting issues. Most of my output goes into pdf format for training and other purposes. The originals get saves as .doc for compatibility and future editing. I have a GP resource CD which is all pdfs produced in OOo for our GPs who all have Acrobat courtesy of MD2, so they can open the documents without recourse to MS Office, of course. My big success story to-day, is to fix a document that our recent CEO, now Chairman, edited in her laptop using Word 2003 and sent to our Executive Assistant, unknown to me. The EA then edited it a number of times in Word 97 till it ceased to work. On alerting me to the problem, [it's the latest revision of our P&P manual] I found that the 58 page, 14,000 word document had bloated out to 265 megabytes. Yes, 265 megabytes! I copied it to my local drive, then opened the 265MB file in OOo 2.0, which took several minutes. It appeared to be fine in terms of formatting and content. Then I saved it as a new file, which took seconds. Aha! I'll bet the bloat is gone! Yes, the newly saved version in Word 97/2000/XP format is now 800kb! That's a 300 times reduction in the size of the file. I returned to the EA's PC and we opened the new, 800kb version in Word 97. Perfect, formatting identical to the original document, all content in place, including the graphic of the Division structure. A fossick through the admin files showed various previous versions of the manual from 380kb to 10MB in size. Content variations of maybe 3-400 words and 1 graphic explain these common Word file size variations, up to a point. But 265 MB, that's nuts! Ain't Word wonderful!! Not!! Zimbra sounds great, I'll follow it up as our new CEO is interested in an Exchange alternative. He wants the functionality, but we don't have the $$$ for Exchange, and I hate to see us waste the money. Greg -- Greg Twyford Information Management & Technology Program Officer Canterbury Division of General Practice E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph.: 02 9787 9033 Fax: 02 9787 9200 PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL *********************************************************************** The information contained in this e-mail and their attached files, including replies and forwarded copies, are confidential and intended solely for the addressee(s) and may be legally privileged or prohibited from disclosure and unauthorised use. If you are not the intended recipient, any form of reproduction, dissemination, copying, disclosure, modification, distribution and/or publication or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance upon this message or its attachments is prohibited. 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