Could you scrap Microsoft Office applications?

IBM’s Lotus Symphony is a free-of-charge alter­na­tive to the ubiq­ui­tous Microsoft Office suite, based on Sun’s open source OpenOffice soft­ware. It pur­ports to remain com­pat­i­ble with Microsoft’s “.doc” for­mat (and newer incar­na­tions), while remov­ing licens­ing costs (but, not of course, sup­port costs, since peo­ple still need train­ing, tech­ni­cal sup­port still costs money, etc.). Now they’ve decided to walk the walk:

360.000 IBM work­ers have been told to stop using Microsoft Office and switch to the Open Office-based soft­ware Symphony.

via IBM Throws Out Microsoft Office — Linux Magazine Online .

In legal cir­cles, stan­dards change slowly — some courts still require WordPerfect doc­u­ments, years after Microsoft Word eclipsed the for­mer dom­i­nant word proces­sor in other fields. Theoretically, of course, Symphony (or OpenOffice) still sup­ports older for­mats — but I’m sure I’m not the only one to have suf­fered minor or major incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties — even between dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Microsoft Word itself!

So could you make the switch? Would the cost sav­ings be worth the poten­tial hassles?

I mostly have switched away from Word. Unfortunately, I’ve had to keep one licensed copy of Word around to deal with strange issues that may crop up. Usually, these involve col­lab­o­ra­tive edit­ing projects (“track changes”), or tightly for­mat­ted doc­u­ments, like resumes (which just don’t per­fectly translate).

But I have not switched to OpenOffice, nor to Lotus Symphony. I increas­ingly believe OpenOffice and its kin are court­ing irrel­e­vancy now that Google Docs and other cloud based office suites are gain­ing ground, and my tools reflect this.

Is the future in the cloud, not the open-source desk­top? My work habits say, “Yes.” (But not with­out a nag­ging worry about con­fi­den­tial­ity in the cloud.)

So where is the future of legal com­put­ing going?

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• Interoperability eludes Office and OpenOfffice (theregister.co.uk)
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