[AusNOG] [off-topic] SharePoint F/OSS equivalent

[Kai]

Majority of our machines are running Office 2003, our directors are looking to SharePoint 2010/Office 2010 as an overall communications suite, file sharing/storage, bulletin board, portal etc I'm high-ish in the food chain but not high enough to have a large say in what gets decided, but if I don't put in some feedback I'll never know.

The main thing I'm trying to avoid is vendor/file format lockin, and licensing restrictions that say "hey, you got Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003...which we know still work just fine, but, we want you to buy more software even though you probably don't need it so we're gunna stipulate that you have to upgrade to xxxx for yyyy to work. You could TRY to use yyyy with mmmm but we made sure most of the features don't work, that should be incentive to upgrade", and of course no where in any sales pitch do they mention TCO so far as user retraining and all the other costs which aren't obvious at first glance.

I understand there are patches for office 2003/2007/2010 that allow .doc files from each version to be edited, saved and openable but since I work for a government organisation, I don't want the files we publish to dictate what software people have to use to view it. Standards are there for a reason, backwards compatibility is important, and, generally speaking I don't like the way Microsoft is going with their file formats or their attitude to anything that's not Microsoft. I'm not saying "F/OSS is the only tool for the job" but on the other hand, if you only use one vendor you're not giving yourself (m)any options...

I'd love to at least trial OpenOffice in here but since SharePoint relies so heavily on it (vendor lock in here we come) I don't think the idea will be too popular.

Cheers
Kai

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Ramsay" <pramsay at uecomm.com.au>
To: "Kai" <vk6ksj at westnet.com.au>, "ausnog" <ausnog at ausnog.net>
Sent: Monday, 31 May, 2010 9:40:20 AM GMT +09:30 Darwin
Subject: RE: [AusNOG] [off-topic] SharePoint F/OSS equivalent

I find Sharepoint quite good but unable to measure it against similar
programs. Through a web gui it gives lots of capability and access
control and can be customised/structured quite nicely for different
departments and for ITIL framework implementation. I like the idea of
having a central storage for documents so that when you update a doc it
is the only one for users to use and not like the old days of having
different versions of the same doc scattered around in different folders
on the shared drive. One thing I found in the version I use (2007) is
that you can't copy an email directly from Outlook, you first have to
save it to a temp file. 
Cheers
~paul


 

-----Original Message-----
From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
[mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Kai
Sent: Monday, 31 May 2010 9:53 AM
To: ausnog
Subject: [AusNOG] [off-topic] SharePoint F/OSS equivalent

Hi ladies and germs,

I hope you've all had a good weekend and fresh and raring to go this
morning....maybe some caffeine assisted brain activity? :P

Anyone on list using SharePoint at their workplace who can give me some
constructive feedback on it?

Cheers
Kai
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