[plug] MS Office and TCO

[Leon Brooks]

Bradley Woodward wrote:
> Being able to imbed an Excel
> spreadsheet in a VISO drawing which is part of a Power point slide show, and
> then have it automatically email itself at the end is of less use, but
> somebody must want to do it, because I have about 15 meg worth of support
> DLLs to let me.

One co I support complained regularly about how slow and erratic their Internet
link was ("It must be the Linux box") until I showed them the MRTG graphs with
little plateaux where an inbound or outbound PowerPoint presentation (as email
attachment) had flooded their ISDN link for three quarters of an hour (20
megabytes) at a time.

>> Another TCO revelation arrives with the first macro virus.

> Well yeah, exactly.  Last time a vbs virus tore through our company, I
> laughed when the accountant bemoned the cost of the clean up operation.

> But all they did was spend a small fortune on anti virus software for
> Exchange.  Doesn't stop the viruses of course, but it does make everybody
> feel warm and cozy.  Me?  I make backups on floppy disk and put them in the
> desk drawer.

Aha! So _that's_ where all of the reinfestations are coming from! (-:

>> Another one is sanity. It might be worth an extra salary for a young Python
>> geek to keep a hundred office staff from smacking their heads against the
>> monitor glass as MS-Office-induced mayhem hits critical mass.

> I must be working for strange organisations then.  The last two have been MS
> places, and I can't remember one Office induced mayhem in 9 years.

Oh, I can. I have a crystal-clear memory of the look on a legal secretary's face
as she realised that a bung Word macro had saved over the top of the last three
days' work, twice (grind those bits into the disk! pound 'em, boys!), and the
last time she'd backed up was... three days beforehand.

> Our NT 4 servers get rebooted about once a 3
> weeks/a month or whenever Technology Park decides to cut power to everybody,
> just for a laugh.

When installing Mandrake or SuSE, set the partition type on anything important
to ReiserFS.

> It hangs in very well.  The fun part is when you can show
> them how to get rid of two $5000 servers (that's $5000 each) and replace them
> with one box filled with software that costs exactly $0.00.  And if Sendmail
> could do forms, I think I'd have been able to do it too.

Uh, what is "do" forms? What kind of forms? I ask this because there are many
tools for processing form-like information out of email streams, and turning a
web-form into email is a one-liner in PHP.

>> Eh? SO writes MS-Office formats. Not only that, it writes them better than
>> MS-Office, in the sense that more non-Office apps can read more of SO's
>> "MS-Office" files than they can of the genuine article.

> The idea of Word
> not being able to write Word documents as well as another word processor is
> just a little hard to take.

Next time Word royally screws up a WP document, try it in SO. If SO can read it,
point this out. Each time.

>> So how did Daddy Dearest start using MS-Office in the first place? I think
>> his argument is specious in that it doesn't address the real issue.

> Because somebody installed it on his computer and showed him how to.  Same
> reason I'd say 90% of people do.

So in essence you're doing the right thing with SO by replicating this process.

> Whatever...  My #1 requirement for a desktop is making sure I can get a
> picture of Gillian Anderson on it.  Everything else is just icing.

I won't ask.

-- 
I wouldn't touch ActiveX with a 10-foot polecat.
I might, however, let one loose on the developers.
    -- cddukes at eos.ncsu.edu