Target Tracker without MS Office! Is it possible!

[CM786]

Hi guys,

I have been told to install Target Tracker onto our school network. Problem I have found is that it seems to require Microsoft Office almost exclusively to work!

This school uses (quite happily) Open Office 2.0! Arrgh! Is their anyway of making Target Tracker work without having to use MS Office?

Thanks,
CM786

[eean]

It barely works with microsoft office - it's so fussy between versions that I doubt you'll ever get it to work with anything else.
It's got a use for senior management but as a teacher, I can pretty much promise you that it's rubbish. I sat down and spent a weekend trying to put the targets in and it crashed that often that I nearly thew it out of the window.

[CM786]

Unfortunetly the LEA are currently pushing it like crazy and the SMT think this gonna save them loads of work!

[eean]

Well tell them that it'll cost £25 x how many computers they have for MS office licence!
It's good for the smt, but they are the only ones that really need to use it. We have it installed on one office pc and the head's pc. The bits that individual teachers would have to use - creating and managing targets - sounds like a good idea. But really the system is too inflexible and unreliable (I did use it last year, so it may have changed a bit - but i doubt it!)

[CM786]

Another thread update!

Had to go and buy some licenses for MS Office 2003 at £31 each which really doesn go against the whole idea of using OpenOffice.org. But I have changed file associations so that all documents are opened by Open Office apart from MS Excel doucments so it works with Target Tracker.

@eean - you are right - it is very slow and prone to crashing!

[cooper]

Im looking into installing openoffice around the school.

We currently have a few differnet versions of office and saving can be a slight problem.

I also have target tracker running here.

I was thinking about putting Office 2007 on all staff laptops and the 3 admin computers and running open office to the rest.

Would there be any drawbacks with this?

Does open office work with share point.

[seanmh]

Hi guys,

I have been told to install Target Tracker onto our school network.

Why bother? It's crap!

My school uses it and it's nothing but grief, every-one runs in the opposite direction, but we have a "must use it, must use it" attitude that somehow has become my problem.

I hate this piece of software and support sucks, do yourself a favour, tell the power at be that you can't install it.

Had to laugh, today receiver the Target Crapper Foundation 2.2 upgrade - failed when I installed had to remove old version and then reinstall, even deployed via MSI - big warning on documentation Please Note Target Tracker does not work on windows Vista - It barely works on Windows XP nevermind vista!!!