FAA May Ditch Microsoft's Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo - Technol... - 0 views
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Bowen's compatibility concerns, combined with the potential cost of upgrading the FAA's 45,000 workers to Microsoft's next-generation desktop environment, could make the moratorium permanent. "We're considering the cost to deploy [Windows Vista] in our organization. But when you consider the incompatibilities, and the fact that we haven't seen much in the way of documented business value, we felt that we needed to do a lot more study," said Bowen. Because of Google Apps' sudden entry into the desktop productivity market
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The FAA issues their "NO ViSTA" mandate, hinting that it might be permanent if they can come up with MSOffice alternatives. They are looking at Google Apps!
Okay, so plan B does have legs. The recent failure of ISO/IEC to stand up to the recidivist reprobate from Redmond is having repercussions. Who would have ever thought ISO would fold so quickly without ceremony? One day there are 20 out of 30 JTCS1 national bodies (NB's) objecting to Micrsoft's proprietary XML proposal, the MOOX Ecma 376 specfication, and the next ISO is approving without comment the placing of MOOX into the ISO fast track where approval is near certain. With fast track, the technical objections and contradictions are assumed to be the provence of Ecma, and not the JTCS1 experts group.
Apparently the USA Federal Government divisions had a plan B contingency for just such a case. And why not? Microsoft was able to purchase a presidential pardon for their illegal anti trust violations. If they can do that, what's to stop them from purchasing an International Standard? Piece of cake!
But Google Apps? And i say that as one who uses Google Docs every day.
The problem of migrating away from MSOffice and MOOX to ODF or some other "open" XML portable file format is that there are two barriers one must cross.
The first barrier is that of converting the billions of MS binary docuemnts into ODF XML.
The second is that of replacing the MSOffice bound business processes that drive critical day to day business operabions.
Google Apps is fine for documents that benefit from collaborative computing activities. But there is no way one can migrate MSOffice bound business processes - the workgroup-worflow documents to Google Apps. For one thing Google Apps is unable to facillitate important issues like XForms. Nor can they round trip an ODF document with the needed fidelity a