Can you really live without Microsoft Office?

Open source and cloud computing alternatives can replace Office in some circumstances

 

The support issue becomes more critical when an organization wants to allow flexibility in users' choice of personal productivity software. In these cases, the IT support staff must learn and support a primary productivity suite (usually Microsoft Office) and all the other suites in use. This scenario is the stuff of nightmares for many IT managers, who imagine their staffs constantly learning new applications to support individual users. For these managers, support and compatibility costs can easily combine to make the move to any productivity suite besides Microsoft Office untenable.

Assessing the options
Out of the four main Microsoft Office alternatives available, three could reasonably be used as the personal productivity piece of an organization's software arsenal. (For a more complete look at the four alternatives, see InfoWorld's Test Center review.) Of the four, only Google Docs seems not quite ready to take on the full mantle of business use. It's fine for an occasional project or for special purposes, but it's simply too limited in functionality and features to be a serious day-to-day contender. Google's development team (and large corps of third-party developers) has written an impressive variety of tools for publishing data in Google Docs on the Web, but those tools don't make up for the lack of some very basic capabilities in both word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Both OpenOffice.org and Zoho could ably serve as the personal productivity solution for many organizations. OpenOffice.org is traditionally deployed on a variety of workstations, whereas Zoho is a poster child for cloud-delivered applications, especially in the small-business market. While neither is perfect in moving files back and forth to Microsoft Office, and neither has as many features in as many individual applications, the advantages they offer in platform independence and free license cost are worthwhile.

Lotus Symphony, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. It has three well-designed applications, but the suite as a whole is not as capable as OpenOffice or Zoho because it doesn't provide database, communications, or collaboration capabilities. If you handle those in some other way, Symphony could ably take on the big functions of personal productivity: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. Symphony Write is especially capable at creating and organizing complex documents -- with a more comprehensive supporting cast, it could be a real competitor in this market.

Individual users and small organizations now have several legitimate options to consider when choosing a personal productivity suite. OpenOffice.org and Zoho, in particular, are capable collections of applications that are full competitors in the personal productivity space. For most larger organizations, though, the sheer inertia of the Microsoft Office installed base will make switching to another suite difficult. Whether the changes in the latest versions of the Microsoft software make overcoming inertia worthwhile will depend on how each of the options continues to improve and how much users are willing to explore possibilities in the face of the changes.

Related articles
Test Center review: Office killers pack some heat
Cloud-based Google Docs and Zoho, as well as desktop-bound IBM Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice.org, put Microsoft's productivity suite on notice
Why 'no Macs' is no longer a defensible IT strategy
More users are demanding Macs in the enterprise. Thanks to key computing shifts, supporting their appetite for Apple is now a straightforward option for IT
Making desktop Linux work for business
When it comes to making the break from Windows, Linux is ready when you are

Curtis Franklin Jr. is senior analyst of the InfoWorld Test Center.