Office 2000 or Office XP?

[ChrisH]

I have finally managed to get a good listing of what software licences we have ands some totals are to my suprise.
Most computers have Office 2000 on them and about 60 have 2003. I dont have many good experiences with office XP but that was a while back.
So basically would you say put Office XP on or just leave them with 2000 on?

[Dos_Box]

Neither. Office 2000 is dead and Office XP just about to be, and with a new Office release due next year it drives further nails into the coffin. TBH OOo 2.0
would be a far better choice, but if you had, I mean REALLY had to install an old Office product then I would choose XP as it has a smaller footprint. Publisher 2000 is far to evil to put on any platform.

[ChrisH]

Would have to be XP as they wouldnt pay for new licences. Hmm I will have an experiment.

[Geoff]

Yep. OO.org 2.0 gets my vote.

[Ric_]

@ChrisH: You could always go for StarOffice if the powers that be don't like the sound of OpenOffice. Sun's a pretty big company after all

If you don't have enough XP licenses, surely you should baseline on 2K so that everything is the same. You then tell them that you are running unsupported Office software which is 5 years old and the software release 3 generations on is due out next year. This then makes a reasonable case for using a free alternative - reducing security risks, providing enhanced features, etc.

[nawbus]

StarOffice and OpenOffice are great, especially as both are free (SOffice to education), BUT they are not MS Office. That is the reason that management will use for not getting either of them.
'Everyone' uses MS Office don't they? Irrespective of the fact that most are illegal copies and you can get legal OO or SO for free.
That's the big brick wall you are up against!

[Geoff]

Problem with MS Office is that you need to run the same version everywhere otherwise you run into interoperability problems. Ironically the same sort of problems you would have with OO.org.

I agree for the moment MS Office is probably the safe bet for 'admin' machines/networks. However on the educational side of things I don't think you can really dismiss OO.org as a non-starter. At least give them a choice and install both. OO.org 2.0 makes a network roll out so easy.

[Ric_]

Some very good points were made about MS Office at the conference yesturday.

1. All government computers will have to support the Open Doucment Standard in the near future - OpenOffice, StarOffice, WordPerfect... all support this but MS Office does not.
2. The chances are that the kids will not be using the version of Office that you have in School when they finally get a job. The kids in year 7 have at least 5 years before hitting the job market and MS Office 2006 is to be released next year so what you've got now is going to be out of date!
3. The curriculum does not teach the kids how to use MS Office - it teaches them how to use IT effectively (i.e. transferable skills).
4. Business is slowly moving away from MS Office as alternatives become a cost effective and viable alternative.

[russdev]

arr so you were listening it...

I am about to test oo 2.0 here to make sure it is ok and then going to roll out across the board..


Russ

[ChrisH]

I have been looking at it the past few days. Cant find anything in the suite that does templates for leaflets and stuff like Publisher is it hiding/something to download/not there?

[Ric_]

Publisher is nasty and evil. Just had to get that out the way!

You could design a leaflet template (and, since you'll be really proud of it, submit it for inclusion in the next release) and drop it into the install.

I'm sure that somebody must make available free templates for openoffice - admittedly I cannot find them at present.

[mark]

We have deployed Staroffice7 and MS office 2000 across our network. [2003 on some rebel technology dept PC's too]. We couldn't change to StarOffice at the time because relational database instruction was part of the curriculum here. However the newly released StarOffice8 does have a relational database built in so that's no longer a problem [when the teaching staff get familiar with it]. It also supports the Open Document standard and has extra bonusses such as direct export to PDF from many of the apps. I've read the next version of MS office does support Open Document but it's not out yet.
Powys County Council [the biggest employer hereabouts], along with a growing number of businesses, have standardised on OpenOffice, so you couldn't easily argue that kids won't see it in the workplace. And as was said at the conference - you're required to teach wordprocessing, not how to use Word.
As was also said , providing the option of another office suite is a way to show users everything doesn't necessarily have to be done with M$.

Publisher is a permanent thorn. I'd love to find an alternative. We were using Macromedia Freehand as part of the MX Studio Suite - but it's been discontinued in the new version of Studio .

[Geoff]

Wait patiently for the Win32 port of scribus perhaps?

http://www.scribus.net/

[mark]

That looks really good Geoff

[russdev]

ok so what is better star office or open office

Russ