Mass Migration Away from MS Office at IBM: Will it Work?
by Sam Dean - Sep. 14, 2009Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
- As IBM and Canonical Eye Africa, OLPC's Missteps Come to Mind
- Linux and Virtualization Will March Forward Together
- Red Hat: Right On the Radar of Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Microsoft
- OStatic Buffer Overflow...
- Tiny SoftMaker's Office Suite Beats OpenOffice in Reviews. What Gives?
In one of the largest enterprise-mandated migrations away from Microsoft's Office suite ever, Linux Magazine and German sources report that 360,000 IBM workers have been ordered to switch from Office to IBM's own Lotus Symphony suite. Symphony isn't open source, but it is free, and is deeply rooted in open source, originally based on OpenOffice code. Apparently, the employees have only ten days to switch, and Open Document Format (ODF) will become the standard file format at IBM, replacing .doc files. The German economic newspaper "Handelsblatt" also reports that 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony.
A look at some of the comments posted in response to the Linux Magazine item reveals some of the problems that IBM employees may run into in switching app suites. According to one post: "The problem is Excel. Excel is the gold standard for spreadsheets. Numbers on OSX is complete trash and Open Office Calc is terrible." There are also a few posts from IBM employees who haven't been affected by the mandate, but it doesn't appear to be company-wide in the first place.
The claim about Excel is valid, in my opinion. Excel is the best spreadsheet product, and Microsoft put a lot of resources into developing it over the years. Employees giving up Excel may very well run into incompatibilities with macros, graphics and other aspects of spreadsheet files, although numbers and formulas are reasonably compatible between Symphony's spreadsheet and Excel.
Still, despite possible hiccups, I could see the IBM employeess living with Symphony. As I wrote here, Symphony is actually one of the oldest integrated productivity app suites, first released in 1984 by Lotus, which is now a division of IBM. It does a pretty good job with compatibility with Office files, and has long supported Open Document Format (ODF). Other organizations making the switch may want to take note of the fact that IBM offers extremely low cost support for Symphony.
As it currently stands, the migration at IBM is more of an experiment than anything else. I suspect some employees will protest and stay with Microsoft Office, but the IBM migration is very notable for its size, for the boost it may give Open Document Format, and for other reasons. We'll see what comes of it.
Share Your Comments
