[Leaplist] microsoft / novell -- Can I get a STFU?

[Chris]

Damien McKenna wrote:

>On 11/6/06 11:09 AM, William Warren
><hescominsoon at emmanuelcomputerconsulting.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>actually I don't have any clients that embed other office apps inside
>>other office apps.
>>    
>>
>
>You don't need to be embedding apps within each other, there are other
>limitations.
>
>  
>
Which don't apply to 90+% of the stuff I see office used for.
Honestly, when it comes to SOHO, I swear all of the documents
I've seen could have been produced as effectively in RTF
using Wordpad. And much of the Excel work I see is pure
abuse of use of a spreadsheet as a database, which kind of
needs to be discouraged anyway.

>>The only hangup is access on my clients.  Once i can get access
>>compatibility then ms office is gone..:)
>>    
>>
>
>You'll never get Access compatibility.  Rewrite the apps using Ruby-on-Rails
>or something similar.
>  
>

Thank goodness I'll never got Access compatability. That's
kind of like one of those relationship breakups where the
other person screams, "You'll never find anyone else like me!",
And you're thinking, "Gee, I sure hope not." Dunno
about Ruby, but I know from experience that Python and
ODBC can be your friend in that migration.

The catch is - re-writing the apps, depending on their
complexity can require deep pockets. And an organization
with pockets deep enough to afford that is probably also
big enough to have one or two MS Office power users whose
carefully crafted empires are part of the corporate infrastructure.

The best you can hope for there is to nibble around the edges
of the cheese. Fortunately, those are pretty big edges, and if
you play your cards right, you may even be able to seduce
the MS Office "power users" over to the dark side of the force.
After all, they're geeks at heart - they just don't know any
better ;-)

Cheers,

Chris