Thank you all VERY much.

[Cavallo]

I just registered for the forums specifically so I could drop by and heap you guys with praise. Seems NeoOffice is a bit more of a struggle than the technical challenges alone, so I thought perhaps a little ego stroke would be helpful.

I do IT for a small newspaper in Central NY. Mercifully, we're about a 98% Mac shop, or I'd likely have gone postal long ago.

MS Office has always been a gigantic pain in the arse-technica for me. We had a few licenses dotted around the building with people constantly whining about not being able to have their own copy, or not fully comprehending when I tell them that we're limited to x concurrent users so someone else will have to quit theirs, etc... I guess the best way to put it is that Microsoft's licensing doesn't scale down well.

When I first heard of OpenOffice, I was naturally very interested. I tried it. I suppose it might have worked, but it certainly wasn't something I could deploy, maintain, and invest time trying to get my userbase to understand. I mentally filed it away under 'geek tool' and let the idea go. I'd revisit the idea periodically, but it never seemed ready for prime time.

Oddly enough, NeoOffice had completely escaped my notice. Our Business Office manager read about it and passed it on to me. At first I figured 'oh great - yet another cheesy unix port.' Fortunately, my first exposure was from the Aqua age. I was delighted to see that rarest of beasties - a competent and useful unix port.

One barrier remained to wide adoption, however. Being a small, independent company, our purchasing power isn't what it could be. Couple that with the longevity of Apple iron, and I wind up having quite an amazing base of older G3 and G4 PowerMacs still plugging along like troopers. NeoOffice performance and resource usage on these machines was an issue, so again, I mentally shelved the entire concept of open-source office suites.

Then the Intel Mac Mini happened.

A couple months ago, I talked the boss into putting a couple in the business office to replace some truly slug-like machines. They happily sat there doing their day-to-day chores until one day the boss came to me and asked me to inventory our MS Office licenses with an eye to spending large sums of money on upgrades. Repressing the urge to vomit, I sighed and resigned myself to some serious drudgery.

Somewhere in the back of my brain, a thought came bubbling up through the synaptic soup. "I wonder if NeoOffice has an Intel build yet?" Imagine my giddiness at finding one.

Needless to say, it was absolute bliss from the first install. Performance is no longer an issue. Stability is (for whatever functions my users are using) rock solid. Compatibility appears to be total.

From my standpoint, the fact that you're doing real, honest-to-goodness installer packages means that I can manage a large deployment via Apple Remote Desktop.

Bravo. You guys 'get it.'

The boss just told me to buy 14 new Intel Minis to replace aging hardware in our Advertising department. Guess which office suite they'll have installed by default? At this point, I strongly suspect that our MS Office licenses will spend the rest of their pointless existences mouldering away on that same mental shelf that OpenOffice initially occupied.

Anyway - not only have you saved my company from the greedy clutches of Microsatan, you've also saved me personally a lot of effort and grief.

IMO, you guys exemplify what open-source is meant to accomplish.

Your efforts are deeply appreciated.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

[pluby]

Thanks for your post. It really is nice to hear some of the stories from real people who have benefited from our work. We see the huge monthly download numbers but cold statistics just doesn't give the same warm fuzzy feeling that posts like yours give.

Patrick

[sardisson]

Indeed, the warm fuzzy feelings are very nice

In fact, would you be interested in tweaking your post a little bit so that we can include it in the NeoOffice Press Kit for NeoOffice 2.1?

Our existing "feature story" is a very nice write-up from Ray at the World Scout Bureau, but it's a bit tied to the NeoOffice/J 1.1 release, and I'd like us, at the very least, have a more recent migration story to supplement Ray's story. Your post also spoke to the Aquafication and Intel version that are two of the main features of NeoOffice 2.1.

(By tweaking I envision mostly compressing the "pre-adoption" parts a bit to make it a little shorter....)

Smokey

[Cavallo]

Sure thing. If you like, I'll even ask my boss for permission to name our company explictly, FWIW. PM me with some more detail on your proposed tweaks, and I'll try to get to it tomorrow, or early next week as time permits.

[sardisson]

I haven't gotten to this yet; sorry It's near the top of my list and I hope to get to it this afternoon, or certainly this weekend.

Thanks again for your kind words and you willingness to let us use them

Smokey

[LemonAid]

Cavallo,

Let me add my thanks for your taking the time and effort to tell our community about your search for a better way.

Hearing stories like your companies provide the rest of us hope, and warm feeling about NeoOffice. Sometimes it takes time for a application to mature to the point where it can be deployed to all the users in a company - not just the techies.

I discovered NeoOffice a little over a year ago. It was not available for Intel systems, and still had a lot of Windows/X11 leftovers. It worked better than AppleWorks, document compatible with MS Office formats and I did not have to spend more money on M$ office (upgrades).
Now it runs like a dream on the Core duo systems and has a real Mac Aqua user interface!
It's like a DREAM come true.
- When problems are found and reported, they are rapidly fixed by the developers. (within the scope of this project)
- The NeoOffice community works VERY hard to support and help users. (better than most commercial applications)
- The developers are constantly adding new features as the become available in the OpenOffice.org community (Thanks Patrick and Ed )
- It just keeps getting better. "Heaps of Praise" like yours makes all the hard efforts ... rewarding to ALL. Thank YOU!

Philip ( Came to NeoOffice for the application, stayed for the ... Community! )

<edit> sorry to be so commercial, but I hope that your "Joy of finding NeoOffice" would include a willingness to make a Donation to the current and future development efforts. Much cheaper than buying more MS Office licenses.