Bill's Blog

1 - Yes,... and did you see new SUSE 10.1? Is fantatisc ? Desktop (on 3D) is incredible... I can not wait until see HANNOVER working on SUSE with the INTEGRATED EDITORS included on the own Hannover. Then, add Sametime 7.5 (with MSL, AOL, and other IM gateways) included, and Microsoft will be history on a lot of PCs!!!

Can not wait until see hannover beta.....

2 - So bill, did you try it out yet?

Is it worth junking windows for? or should I wait for the next update

either way it is good news

3 - I've not played with it in depth yet - the weekend has sort of taken me over. Will report more on it early next week.

Basically, if it can run FirM, then I'm a happy man...

---* Bill

4 - It's going to be interesting to see you do development on it. And to see somebody install it who is used to APT.

5 - Given the fact that I have been trying since 1999 to move myself off the Windows platform for my primary Laptop, This could have arrived in 1998 and not been too soon. Notes is the last bastion of Windows functionality that I simply can't get to work reliably enough.

Since 2004 I have been trying to enthuse the Domino community to "out" Microsoft from companies completely. The lights may have been on at IBM, but nobody was at home. Simply I gave up. Workplace was all anyone wanted to hear. It seems that something has changed anyway.

However I am seriously too addicted to my smarticons to take this one seriously right now. When a fully functional release arrives I'll be interested.

My ardour for OpenOffice died the day it took 5 minutes (I'm serious), to re-render 1 visio object in my document. It became completely unmanagable. However I did find one use for Writer. It can completely remove any traces of MS document tracking It's got to be worth a friendly mention for that alone. But move to it as my primary editor? I think I'll need to wait for it to get some real speed first. I hope that the Hannover Editor is significantly more speedy than that or it will wind up in the same bin.

6 - Neil, have you ever tried to edit a document in word, that has some 10 or more bitmap graphics embedded? Have you ever tried to place these bitmaps precisely and having it printed everytime at the same place? This is an additional problem along with the fact, that, depending on the power of your machine, you have to wait sometimes for more than 5 minutes, if you want to move bitmap 25 from page 40 to page 55 ...... that was with Word, yes, I mean MS- .....

To be really fair: you will find such bottlenecks in every big application.

7 - Neil - I have to side with Jens.

Take a peek at our user manual for FirM - 240 odd pages and over 450 screenshots. That would regularly crash Word 97,2000, 2003, and XP (wherever that fits).

its slow in Writer, but its far more reliable, and produces fantastic PDF files.. So no complaints there...

And quite happily produces .DOC files for people on legacy systems..

---* Bill

8 -
Neil I've found the IBM document editor to be faster than Word when rendering our documentation. Can't comment about OpenOffice. In Word you have to wait for the images to show up as you page thru. And forget about it if the doc is on a network drive - images that never appear etc. I learned to copy the files locally before opening in Word - it was the only reliable way to view and especially edit documents with lots of images. Trying to edit you end up with network errors etc, wierd errors the doc is read-only when it clearly wasn't. Again that mainly seemed to be an issue with documents in Word that use images..if docs were all text didn't see those problems across the network.

In the IBM editor the images just appear as you page thru ..using the same document for comparison.

Same experience as Bill - once you have any real documentation (especially with images) Word is very poor. Like him our docs are mainly user guides with lots of images to walk users thru our software...and like Bill we convert them to PDF before sending to our clients.

My favorite story is one of our developers (he was the GUI guy) had spent almost 2 days mocking up screenshots in Delphi, pasting them to Word and writing text for our clients requirements. 3rd morning he opens up the Word doc to finish up and ALL the screenshots are gone..text is there but no images. Of course since he was clipboarding them directly into Word instead of saving them to disk and then putting them in Word - they were all lost. He was not a happy camper.

9 - I have shedloads of documentation with graphics to do over the next few weeks so I'll take that under advisement. Also I have a project of my own to do over the next six months whilst I while away the 2 hours each way on the plane and the 1.5 hours on the train.

Personally I think Openoffice looks like Word 1.0 so it needs something else to get me to move. Like Speed. I've never seen the stability issues so I can only guess.

I have never been in the habit of working on Network documents so I would not have seen the speed issue. To me networks are for backing up my local data..... Longtime Microsoft technology freak I guess.....

Bill, I was looking at Volkers blog and he claims the "native" client for Linux is Workplace plus the plugin??? Did he download the wrong thing or did I win my bet in the end anyway?

10 - Quick update. Just finished the 54 page document. 34 pages of which contain graphics. Really quick. No problems at all. Of course I did use the "Compress" option supplied with Word for it's imported graphics..... Appears on page really fast too. Sub 1 second. Almost faster than a JPEG.

Technology, wonderful stuff.

11 - Neil, I just realized your probably using a later version of Office. I searched in the help for compressing pictures/images and I don't see anything. No options in the file dialog either. We are still on Office 2000 - maybe it's there but I don't see it - although now you mention it I thought I saw it at some point.

We have now moved most of our documents into Notes anyways so we can revision, replicate etc. so the network drive problems are going away..

12 - @11 Yes I found that I am addicted to newer products

I have been waiting for good quality editing and layout controls in Notes for so long my hair has finally gone grey. Now it seems we'll get the tools but the memory requirements look to be prohibitive.

I have been a proponent of using Notes for all doucmentation for a long time for exactly the reasons you say. However the layout and formatting is simply dire by modern standars. It is about even with Word 4.5 for DOS.

13 - So I haven't lost my bet yet.....

I remember our converstation well. You had explained to me that IBM had to create the native client for Linux so that they could create the plugin.

My response? "You'll never see it!"

I wonder if IBM will prove me wrong in the end.

14 - @12 Actually what I meant is we have moved our PDF's and doc files into Notes as attachments. Things like Table of Contents etc would be an issue. I know it can be done in Notes by breaking up each chapter etc into different "notes" but it's not worth the effort at this point.

I would expect the same thing to continue with Hannover except they would be ODF attachments. Unless there is a surprise waiting in Hannover with ODF being either a new native field type in Notes or an extension to RTF to make it seamless etc...but I'm not expecting that.

15 - Yes ODF would trash backward compatability.

It's going to be interesting. I would have said OLE or something like that but Linux and the MAC don't have it so it will have to be something different.

I'm just not sure I want to upgrade almost the Entire desktop population to 1 Gig or more (Hannover recommends 1Gig), just to support ODF and have better native Notes editing......

16 - I don't see any trashing of backwards compatability by moving to ODF since the editors can currently open all our existing Word documents and RTF is still RTF. Given the track record of Notes on the backward compatibility front I'd be surprised if they trashed anything. But maybe I'm missing what your saying.

I would hope NOT OLE - yes that would be a mistake.

I haven't seen any numbers for Hannover but I haven't really looked either. I assume your referring to running under a Windows OS that consumes a chunk of that desktop memory. Linux should present more options in that regard. FWIW the 3 editors consume about 80Mb of ram and the same combo of MS editor apps consume 50Mb. Given the editors are using eclipse I'll wait to see what the real numbers come in at. But I don't see Hannover being any more than Sharepoint, Office 2007, Vista, and the rest of the MS stack required to give us less functiontionality along with integration and upgrade problems.

Of course with the Linux option and the editors built-in to Hannover the money saved on Windows and Office licenses more than pays for upgrading the memory of the desktops. In fact at least 2 GB is looking good :)

As far as the 1 GB desktop have you looked at the memory for Vista, Office 2007? The upgrade the 1 GB is coming at you anyways. Although Hannover may be deployable first.