MkII Posted October 10, 2006 Posted October 10, 2006 There has been a lot of interest on the Powys list about this restriction in SIMS .net. I thought it would be good to let people here know about it as well. I'm sure Capita must be working on solving this, but for the moment, many Powys primary schools are disadvantaged, having completely converted to the Open Office suite as their sole Office solution. ________ Seems that SIMS .net now only works fully with Office 2003+ They made a big fuss about having to be open standards compliant, and so have made printing and reporting xml. But then they also made some components tie into MS Office 2003. So printing, exporting etc all don't work FULLY from SIMS .net if you don't have the latest version of MS Office. Open Office works to a point. [bad news if you're us and waiting for Office 2007 to upgrade the whole site!! :0)] here's a thread on the subject from Capitas' forums that may explain it more fully:- Forum List --> Schools forums --> Technical (67) --> Office 2003 (9170) __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Simon Smith on 31 May 2006 at 3:56 pm Hi, One of our staff came back from a training course and said that a future version of Sims.Net won't run with Office 2000. Does this make sense as I can't find anything about it. __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Marc Rogers on 31 May 2006 at 3:58 pm This does make sense We only test our reports on Office 2003 and there are some reports that will only run on Office 2003 The Performance 7 suite requires Office 2003 I hope this helps Marc __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Jeremy Dhondy on 01 June 2006 at 12:43 am Profiles 7 also needs Office 2003 if you need to generate, print or view profiles. __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Anthony Gordon on 01 June 2006 at 8:07 am I understood that OpenOffice also satisfied the requirement. Is this no longer the case? __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Phil Neal on 01 June 2006 at 8:42 am OpenOffice does run with SIMS but there are limitations on what can be achieved. For example OpenOffice doesn't support the graphing function. __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Norman Milburn on 07 June 2006 at 9:13 am How about Office XP/2002? __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Frederick Dundas on 07 June 2006 at 12:55 pm Norman Milburn wrote... How about Office XP/2002? Excel XP does support XML file creation, but don't think it's been tested where as Office 2003 has. As quoted by the offical Microsoft website Office XP enables users to open XML files; edit, add, and delete data; and then save their work in XML format or native Office XP file types However not sure if it supports the graphing functions, which is the reason OpenOffice isn't suitable. __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Jeremy Dhondy on 07 June 2006 at 1:13 pm Our users of Office Xp have not been able to access profile documents in Word. I don't think 2002 version of Word supports XML files. __________________________________________________________ Message posted by David Carter on 12 June 2006 at 1:45 pm How can Open Office be set to work with SIMS and what are the limitations. __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Marc Rogers on 12 June 2006 at 1:57 pm Hi, When you install Open Office you are giving three tick boxes to choose which files are associated with Open Office. Open Office does not work with the Performance 7 suite. I am unsure of the other limitations Hope this helps Marc __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Anthony Gordon on 12 June 2006 at 3:02 pm Having installed OpenOffice as the default application for .doc and .xls files SIMS.net reports still insists on trying to using Word and Excel to open its output. Has anyone tried this? __________________________________________________________ Message posted by David Carter on 12 June 2006 at 3:53 pm Yes, this is my problem. I have installed OpenOffice on all the lesson monitor PCs in the classrooms, but the teachers are now using Assessment Manager and trying to run reports. All the Admin PCs have MS Office. __________________________________________________________ Message posted by Anthony Gordon on 13 June 2006 at 8:25 am I have removed MS Office from my machine and reinstalled OpenOffice but SIMS still won't play ball. There must be something in the SIMS configuration which is MS specific but I have no idea where. This is an oldish thread [the most recent on the subject] but I can confirm that the problems are still there.
CyberNerd Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 I can't imagine captita will give this a high priority, if they bother at all. Captia are an MS partner company. It's not in their interests to integrate openoffice as much as is it wouldn't be for them to integrate with moodle.
webman Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 Nope, doesn't surprise me at all for the reasons CyberNerd points out.
Ric_ Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 @mark: Which bits don't work unless you have Office 2003? What do these bits do (you will have to excuse my naiivity but I try to stay out of it and not everywhere uses all the modules).
MkII Posted October 11, 2006 Author Posted October 11, 2006 Graphing doesn't work I know - I don't use it myself either so I'm waiting for other restrictions to appear.
ajbritton Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 I understand it works with the free viewers.
MkII Posted October 11, 2006 Author Posted October 11, 2006 I understand it works with the free viewers. Interesting - must try that. But if you have an old version of MS Office [as we do] then how would sims not report an incorrect office version with the viewer for 2003 installed on top? Export to Excel viewer - copy and paste to Excel 2000!
PhilNeal Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 Being a Microsoft Partner has no bearing on this at all. We have provided support for Open Office but there is only so far we can go without incurring significant cost for coding the differences for example graphing. If there was sufficient demand that would make a difference because I could then justify the cost to all customers. There are free viewers and next year we will support output from the Performance Suite into PDF. You will still need the MS product on one machine to set up the templates.
Geoff Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 You know OO.org is open source right? You know you can just write a patch to add whatever you need to OO.org so graphing or works?
CyberNerd Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 Being a Microsoft Partner has no bearing on this at all. We have provided support for Open Office but there is only so far we can go without incurring significant cost for coding the differences for example graphing. If there was sufficient demand that would make a difference because I could then justify the cost to all customers. Seems like there is a growing demand, another barrier removed from OOo deployment is always welcome. -So whens the moodle plugin ? There is certainly demand for that
PhilNeal Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 The IMS links are already in SIMS and documented on our SIMS.CO.UK site. The links can provide both a data dump and incremental change. Granada have implemented the link in Learnwise already - hopefully someone from the Moodle community will do the same.
Geoff Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 This thread is relevant. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=15012
wesleyw Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 I'm actually impressed! We are looking at setting up a sharepoint portal and sims .net web parts and with IMS I might finally be able to push the Moodle VLE out fully! Does anyone know whether or not the Moodle Developer community is writing anything for it though? Wes
MkII Posted October 12, 2006 Author Posted October 12, 2006 Re the free office viewers This is from the Capita forums today:- When we started using Profiles 7 we were aware that any machine generating profiles would need Office 2003 because earlier versions don't understand XML.We were told that Word viewer would solve the problem of staff being able to see if not edit profiles but this was emphatically not the case and this route should not be taken as one that will solve any problems. The last I heard from Capita was an acknowledgement that it did not work and some work was being done to see if this could be changed but all has gone silent since then (then being last June or July).
PhilNeal Posted October 13, 2006 Posted October 13, 2006 I've looked into the MS viewer issue and there is a problem which we hope to resolve. We thought the viewer worked but found out afterwards that it was relying on other Office components that were on our machines. We know we can't reslove it by December but are hopeful that a solution will be available early 2007.
MkII Posted November 3, 2006 Author Posted November 3, 2006 Got a disturbing email from our sims support team today: You will need Office 2003 in order to run Assessment Manager 7 which will be in the next release. Assessment Manager 6 will be switched off in a few months so you must upgrade your version of Microsoft Office to 2003. SIMS say that their links to Office are now OML-based (Outline Markup Language). Products like Open Office can apparently cope with OML but the Microsoft versions prior to Office 2003 cannot. So if you have Office XP or Office 2000 or Office 97 you must upgrade as soon as possible to Office 2003. However, SIMS have also said that you only require Office 2003 if you intend to print, so you could just install it on one machine. It's probably best to upgrade as many machines as you can afford to. 2) Microsoft Office on your Server. Which of the following statements applies to you? A) You currently have Office 2003 on your server which is great, because it means I can run Assessment Manager over the remote link when you ask for my help. B) You currently have Office on your server, but it's not Office 2003. This means I might not be able to help you with Assessment Manager after the upgrade, especially the design of individual reports. C) You do not have Office installed on your server at all. This means I can't help you with Assessment Manager and I can't run any reports on your system. I tried installing the office viewers but get the error: "Unable to set up the Office path" when trying to export from Assessment Manager - newest version
PhilNeal Posted November 4, 2006 Posted November 4, 2006 Please see my response earlier in this thread. We are aware that the viewer doesn't function properly. We hope to have a fix early in 2007.
GrumbleDook Posted November 4, 2006 Posted November 4, 2006 We were upgrade to AM 7 yesterday and I do like a number of the changes ... I have some concerns about the XML formatting of exported spreadsheets (hence the need for Office 2003) as it creates a certain amount of work for me (and I am a lazy git ... and hate things that create more work). Packages in SIMS are starting to come together but I am worried about Office 2007 now. I hope to be testing it in anger soon with a few teachers and it means that I may have to stop so they can still do reports etc ....
Roopert Posted March 19, 2008 Posted March 19, 2008 Sorry to re-open such an early thread, but does SIMS.Net assessment manager now support graph functions in openoffice? I have machines which still have the needing microsoft office issue, but this may be that an upgrade will fix this. Any feedback would be appreciated.
PhilNeal Posted March 20, 2008 Posted March 20, 2008 No we haven't done the additional work that would be required to make Open Office deal with graphs. The free MS viewer will.
Roopert Posted March 25, 2008 Posted March 25, 2008 Okay thanks for the info, I will investigate the viewer option then.
Roopert Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 (edited) When exporting from assessment manager it tries to open in the excel 2003 viewer but says that it cannot open files of this type. I have the word xml and the excel viewer installed in the default location and the office compatibility pack for 2007. As i understand it i want to be loading this file into the word viewer if it is xml? but the output is automated to the excel viewer. any suggestions here? Edited March 28, 2008 by Roopert
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