Office Perils

Last year, in a post on July 30, title The Power of Open Put To The Test, I mentioned a test I was planning to see how open source productivity tools held up in a consulting environment, where colleagues and clients rely on Microsoft's Office suite. Outcome of this test, which focused primarily on OpenOffice 2.0's compatibility with MS Office, is that while functionality-wise OpenOffice (OO) appears to match MS Office fully, some things still go astray with respect to the conversion of document formats. For example, while the quality of import and export filters in Impress has made a giant leap when compared to previous versions of OO, layouts may still get mixed up a bit when PowerPoint documents are imported.

Another barrier to full-fledged adoption of OO by professionals like me is the lack of support for macros in Excel. Programmed in Microsoft's proprietary Visual Basic it is understandable that OO does not support them, but it also makes that I will never have the required 100% guarantee that Excel models produced by colleagues or clients will function in Calc as intended. And although I strongly discourage colleagues to use macros in the first place - Keep it simple, stupid! (KISS) - it sometimes proves too tempting to resist. Hence, it still is a bridge too far for consultants to rely solely on open source productivity tools for their day-to-day work, especially as most of their clients are likely to use MS Office.

Given these issues, the use of Linux-based laptops by professionals is somewhat problematic as well. While Microsoft does offer Office for Mac, the release of a Linux version of Office is highly unlikely. A more practical work-around would be running MS Office under Wine, a Windows emulator for Linux. However, the fact that Wine is still working towards version 1.0 (currently at version 0.9.8), full compatibility and stability cannot be guaranteed yet. Or you could buy CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office, which allows you to run a broad range of Windows applications under Linux. Finally, one could simply wait until open source projects like OO fully support the Microsoft Office Open XML format, whose specifications were released some time ago. But be warned: you may have to wait forever!

Drucker Revisited

In an earlier post, commenting on the death of Peter F. Drucker, I mentioned that the next book I would read would be one of Drucker's. Although I slipped in some other books first (Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class), I finished Drucker's The Practice of Management from 1954 about two weeks ago. I can now understand why Drucker is often called 'the Guru of Gurus'. Although his language is sometimes somewhat dated (or just typical 50s), he writes about management in a clear and concise way, discussing topics which are still being debated by management writers today. According to Drucker, management is made up of three things, namely managing a business, managing managers and managing worker and work. The work of the manager himself consists of five basic operations:

• Setting objectives
• Organizing
• Motivating and communicating
• Measuring
• Developing people

The Practice of Management is the book in which Drucker introduced Management by Objectives (MBO), which is very much the front runner of Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard. In essence a tool to establish alignment and implement strategy, it touches upon business architecture, the subject of my own book, as well, although indirectly. In conclusion I can say that I enjoyed reading my first Drucker book and believe that some more will follow in the future.