KOfficce goes commercial?

[DrewJensen]

The full article can be found at KOfficeSource: a KOffice Consultancy Company.

"The founding of KOfficeSource GmbH shows the commercial potential of the KOffice suite.", said Sebastian Kügler, KDE e.V. director. "It is great to see a company spinning off the KDE Community. Combining the commercial experience in the field with excellent connections in the community seems to be a recipe for success. And success is also what we wholeheartedly wish to the founders of KOfficeSource.

Kügler continues: With the upcoming release of KOffice 2 later this year, this makes for a new contender in the office market space which no doubt will be beneficial for institutional, commercial and home users alike.

On the one hand this creates a stronger rival for OpenOffice.org, but I believe this competition is healthy for both communities:

• It further strengthens the case for a common office document format delivering on the promise that using such a standards based approach opens up the opportunities for end users to make decisions based on their needs.
  
  It also should act as a stimulus, hopefully, to the development teams in OpenOffice.org to think outside of the Microsoft Office box.

[kingfisher]

My understanding is that the new company will be providing support for kOffice, which will remain a free open source project. Version 2.0.0 is expected to provide stronger competition. kOffice uses the open document formats as the default formats.

P.S. Thanks for the link.

[DrewJensen]

That is my understanding also - the applications are still FOSS - it is about the developers forming a commercial support organization.

[Villeroy]

http://dot.kde.org/1199838571/

The founders comprise a small group of members of the developer community, as well as outside talent. They share an interest in furthering KOffice by supporting it commercially in addition to the non-commercial support that can be found on the mailing lists and IRC.

Does this mean that those developers have some idea about how to use KOffice software in the real world?

Sometimes I'm asking myself if anybody at Sun uses StarOffice for anything non-trivial (except debugging). Did they ever try to create a Base document for someones day-by-day use?

[kingfisher]

The support organisation has been formed with an eye to kOffice 2.0.0 to be released this year. It will, I'm told, be a significant improvement on the existing software. kWord is a pleasure to use after Writer but kSpread seems to be nothing more than a toy. I've heard good things about Krita and understand Kexi needs work. I'm looking forward to the release of version 2.0.0, which, BTW, is to be multi-platform.

Sometimes I'm asking myself if anybody at Sun uses StarOffice for anything non-trivial (except debugging).

I've asked myself the same question many times. I would not use the suite in a commercial environment unless production requirements were extremely low.

[yorick]

The support organisation has been formed with an eye to kOffice 2.0.0 to be released this year. It will, I'm told, be a significant improvement on the existing software. kWord is a pleasure to use after Writer but kSpread seems to be nothing more than a toy. I've heard good things about Krita and understand Kexi needs work. I'm looking forward to the release of version 2.0.0, which, BTW, is to be multi-platform.

Sometimes I'm asking myself if anybody at Sun uses StarOffice for anything non-trivial (except debugging).

I've asked myself the same question many times. I would not use the suite in a commercial environment unless production requirements were extremely low.

Are you talking about StarOffice or Koffice here. As far as the Sun people are concerned they must use Staroffice because last time I checked MSO doesn't run on Solaris. Also MSO doesn't save to ODF, and all the documents I've ever received from Sun Staffers since 2.0 launch have been in ODF.

[kingfisher]

I was agreeing with Villeroy's statement about StarOffice. In truth, I was actually thinking of OO. It's years since I looked at StarOffice. Perhaps it's better designed than OO for network use.

The new support company for kOffice seems (from its website) intended to cater for network users of the suite rather than home or small office users. The upcoming version will be multi-platform so it may provide some much needed competition. We had a much better choice before a little company in Redmond monopolised the field.

[DrewJensen]

To the best of my knowledge both Sun and Novell have moved their work forces to StarOffice and OpenOffice respectively.

[ccornell]

Yup, pretty much everyone uses StarOffice in Sun. There are a few people that run Windows or Mac laptops (for business reasons), but even there, it's almost always StarOffice or OpenOffice.org. Here in the Hamburg office, it's a combination of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. I haven't seen ever computer in the company, but I have yet to see anyone anywhere inside Sun using anything but StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.

[Villeroy]

Yup, pretty much everyone uses StarOffice in Sun.

Honestly, this is what I expected when I raised a rhetoric question. I'm shure that everything is set up properly, works as expected and contributes to the overall efficient workflow in your company.

Some pictures from my crystal ball, connected to the beautyful city of Hamburg:
Your text templates are not derived from the 97th hard formatted revision of Word 6.0 templates. Serial letters and labels are just a matter of connecting a well prepared template to a well prepared list. There is almost no need to share documents with MSO users (you can read what they send, you send pdf or text). Who needs spreadsheets in a software company? Most office workers are confronted with forms. How many of your forms for day-by-day work are Base forms?

[ccornell]

Some pictures from my crystal ball, connected to the beautyful city of Hamburg:

Ummmm you ever been here in January There is rumored to be an object some like to call "the Sun"... this wam ball of fire in the sky during the daytime, but... all I see is grey skies and rain. Sigh (I'm a tropics person).

Your text templates are not derived from the 97th hard formatted revision of Word 6.0 templates. Serial letters and labels are just a matter of connecting a well prepared template to a well prepared list. There is almost no need to share documents with MSO users (you can read what they send, you send pdf or text). Who needs spreadsheets in a software company? Most office workers are confronted with forms. How many of your forms for day-by-day work are Base forms?

Ha.. ouch. It's painful to even think about the 97th hard formatted revision of Word6.0 templates. The only way a transition to OOo would or can really work well is a complete conversion - like was done at Sun. A half conversion means you're stuck into a pile of legacy partially working formats and tools.
Base forms? Ummm... none. In most companies I've worked at the "forms" are generally web forms running on an SQL backend of some sort... using Perl or whatever on the web side. I have never had the pain of encountering Base or Access in a corp environment.

[Villeroy]

Ummmm you ever been here in January ...

I spent most of my Januaries in the city of Berlin. Not that rainy and stormy, but slightly colder and the same shades of grey.

A half conversion means you're stuck into a pile of legacy partially working formats and tools.

Partially working formats from any version of MSWord is what people send as mail attachment for revision, to fill out the form, spread the word and show off with the latest version of Word.

Base forms? Ummm... none. In most companies I've worked at the "forms" are generally web forms running on an SQL backend of some sort... using Perl or whatever on the web side. I have never had the pain of encountering Base or Access in a corp environment.

It's even worse -- much worse. The most frequently used database application is Excel. If this office could provide a valuable solution to this problem, OOo3.0 could be much more successful, I believe.

Some of the related problems which account for a considerable amount of posts in the Calc forum:
- Wrong results due to numeric strings hidden in between numbers.
- Wrong range of cells gets sorted (including header, excluding some columns)
- All kinds of troubles with filters
- eliminate/skip duplicate records
- foreign keys (massive lookups across many thousands of rows)
- "input forms"
- csv processing
- "lookup-relations" in file ../Sales/Europe/December\ 2007.xls
- performance, limited count of rows/columns/sheets
- macro to unprotect>check input>insert>copy relation>timestamp>protect
- macro to copy a filtered list from sheet X to mail attachment Y
- macro to ... (mir wird grad schlecht)

[DrewJensen]

I have never had the pain of encountering Base or Access in a corp environment.

Then how do you know it is a pain?

[ccornell]

Then how do you know it is a pain?

An assumption based on what I hear people chatting about when they have to use either Access or Base.

[DrewJensen]

Well leaving Base aside then.

MS Access has a huge base of installed applications that work just fine. When someone uses a tool and it works they are not likely to go praising the thing at every chance they get in every public forum they can find. The opposite is often true however.

As for Excel being the most widely used database in the world. I would agree with that and I would go further to say that is perfectly fine. There is a whole class of use and user for whom this is the best case scenario and best tool. Heck in one way every spread sheet is a database I suppose. Just isn't a relational or multi-user database.

Anyway - just my opinion I suppose.