Study Shows Office Alternatives Failing to Sway Microsoft Users -- Microsoft Certified ... - 0 views
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Gary Edwards on 16 May 11Interesting report from Forrester on Desktop Productivity. It seems everyone is asking about alternatives to MSOffice, but coming away empty handed. Sounds like everyone would like to drop MSOffice, but find the alternatives wanting. IMHO, the Web based alternatives are long on collaboration but short on productivity. Compound Documents, Reports and Forms are the fuel that powers legacy workgroup productivity environments. Web Productivity platforms have a long way to go before they can provide effective, worker facing authoring systems capable of replacing binding and messaging internals such as OLE, ODBC, MAPI, ActiveX, COM and DCOM. There also seems to be considerable confusion about the difference between Web based authoring alternatives to MSOffice, and Web based Productivity Platforms. MSOffice is the authoring system for desktop/WorkGroup productivity environments. But having this authoring system wouldn't mean much if not for the workgroup connectivity and exchange platform behind it that makes highly productive digital business processes and systems possible. Linked Data, messaging, collaboration, and connectivity API's and HTML+ (HTML5, CSS3, JSON, Canvas/SVG, JavaScript) are showing up everywhere. But they are not exclusive to Web based authoring systems. Any desktop authoring system should be able to take advantage of the emerging productivity platform. So what's the problem with OpenOffice, Symphony, Zoho and gDocs? OOo and Symphony can't speak language of the Web; HTML+. Browser based Zoho and gDocs lack the completeness of a Web productivity environment capable of hosting the business processes currently bound to the Windows WorkGroup productivity environment. There is no indication that the experts at Forrester understand what should be obvious. excerpt: According to a new Forrester Research report, IT orgs are still choosing Microsoft Office over its competitors. Two factors appear to be stumbling bloc