Making Nice at the Office

Arguably one of the most important tasks in day-to-day computing that can be accomplished is the creation and sharing of simple office documents. The problem is, those tasks aren't simple. It takes entire suites of software to run a modern office.

In this section we'll survey several office suites. Of course, there's the big one: Microsoft Office, which, of course, runs on Windows. But there are others that can run on Windowsand also on Linux. Along the way, we'll see if they play nicely with each other, or need a little work.

Additionally, in the last chapter, we explored connecting Outlook to Exchange. That was easy to do, but connecting Linux to Exchange is another potential hurdle , which we'll overcome in this section.

Microsoft Office vs. StarOffice vs. OpenOffice

MS Office is the big kid on the block, but there are other third-party office options. In particular, the 100 percent free open source office solution called OpenOffice (available at www.openoffice.org ) is a remarkably complete office suite with a substantial degree of Microsoft Office compatibility.

Also available is StarOffice from Sun Microsystems for a reasonable $70 or so. You can check it out at www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.xml . StarOffice is built on the base code of OpenOffice but has some additional polish around the edges. Specifically , StarOffice includes a database program, a WordPerfect filter, and some other doodads. There is an excellent comparison available at www.sun.com/software/star/openoffice/docs/SO_Comparison_OOo.pdf (which is also shortened to http://tinyurl.com/6pycj ).

Additionally, TechTarget.com has a nice list of questions and answers about the various office suites at http://tinyurl.com/5vefm .

Opening OpenOffice

Installing OpenOffice couldn't be easier. In fact, it's built in to Fedora Core 3. The main parts of OpenOffice are Calc (a calculator with formula support), Draw (a drawing/publishing program), Impress (for presentations), Math (a spreadsheet program), and Writer (for word processing).

Getting started with OpenOffice is easy tooit's right on the Applications image from book Office menu, as shown in Figure 7.8.

image from book
Figure 7.8: OpenOffice is in the Fedora Core 3 distribution, so once you install Fedora Core 3 with our recommended package selections, OpenOffice is right there.

OpenOffice is a very well put together suite of tools that does the job pretty much as advertised. However, in our tests, the main difficulties were in exchanging documents back and forth between OpenOffice and MS Office.

Specifically, PowerPoint files loaded up just fine in OpenOffice, but all the elements weren't translated perfectly . That is, no PowerPoint animations came across. Additionally, some of the text on the pages wasn't aligned or in the right places. Lastly, a common background didn't make its way across either. These are issues we're sure the OpenOffice team is working toward fixing. However, in real life, these would be immediate showstoppers from getting OpenOffice adopted within an enterprise. That is, if you cannot 100 percent interoperate with MS Office, the suite is basically no good for anyone wishing to e-mail files to the rest of the world on MS Office. In short, your testing should include sending sample files back and forth (making changes along the way) between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice before you decide if the compatibility it achieves is good enough for your needs.

There are other issues that make OpenOffice somewhat problematic for power users. In our testing, we had difficulty getting Windows macros to run (as they are based on VBScript, unsupported in OpenOffice). We also had trouble exchanging document templates.

Still, if your goal is to work with an occasional Word or Excel document on Linux and then use "Save As" to save your document in the Word or Excel format for Windows users in your office, OpenOffice can definitely be used in this role. As we mentioned, macros are currently a big exception, and if you are required to use macro-driven VBScript applications built on top of Office, OpenOffice is not an option.

It should be noted that heavyweight Novell has its own version of OpenOffice available, which you can learn more about at www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ooo.html . We didn't test it, but they claim to be able to support macros and quell some other additional MS Office compatibility concerns.

StarOffice 8

As mentioned, StarOffice 8 does include some features beyond those found in OpenOffice, so it's well worth checking out. However, we ran into significant snags with the default installation process on Fedora Core 3.

We'll show you a simple step to overcome the installation problem and, if you're really interested in what those steps do and why they work, you'll find the sidebar "How We Resolved StarOffice 8 Beta Installer Problems" intriguing.

image from book
How We Resolved StarOffice 8 Beta Installer Problems

StarOffice 8 beta ships with a Java-based installation system, wrapped inside a shell script. It's the largest shell script you'll ever see! Once upon a time, many Unix applications were distributed as "shar archives," shell scripts with the actual software binaries to be installed encoded in the script itself. Users would just download the .sh file and run it with the sh command ( sh is the name of the original Unix shell with which Bash is 100 percent compatible, and the sh command is still available for backward compatibility). This format is still occasionally used today instead of an .rpm file when software is meant to run on many different Linux distributions, and that's what Sun has chosen to do with StarOffice 8 beta.

So all you should have to do is download the enormous 204MB .sh file and run it with the sh command, right? Ideally, yes. Unfortunately , as of this writing, the installation program fails on Fedora Core 3 with rather inscrutable error messages. However, the process gets far enough to unpack the files that make up the installation and, as it turns out, it's mostly a big ol' pile of .rpm files.

First we tried installing all of the rpms at one go, with the following command:

 rpm -i *.rpm 

That didn't quite do it because one of the rpms is specifically for SUSE Linux and refuses to install in a non-SUSE environment.

A simple workaround is to rename the one offending rpm staroffice-suse- menus -8.0.0-78.noarch.rpm to s taroffice-suse-menus-8.0.0-78.noarch.old

Then, run rpm -i *.rpm , and it'll work.

image from book
 

Here is the procedure we followed to successfully install StarOffice Beta 8 on Fedora Core 3:

  1. Download StarOffice Beta 8 for Linux or the latest StarOffice release for Linux from Sun's website:

    • http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/beta/

  2. Run the installer you just downloaded:

     sh so-8-beta-bin-linux-en-US.sh 
  3. Accept the default location of /var/tmp/unpack_staroffice when asked where to unpack the software.

  4. The installer may succeed if Sun has addressed the problems by the time you read this. If the installation succeeds, great! If not, continue with the remaining steps.

  5. Change to the directory where the rpms were unpacked:

      cd /var/tmp/unpack_staroffice/RPMS  
  6. Rename the one unused rpm, staroffice-suse-menus-8.0.0-78.noarch.rpm to staroffice-suse-menus-8.0.0-78.noarch.old by typing:

     mv staroffice-suse-menus-8.0.0-78.noarch.rpm staroffice-suse-menus-8.0.0- 78.noarch.old 
  7. Finally, install all rpms with rpm -i *.rpm .

StarOffice is installed! Start up StarOffice by selecting Applications image from book Office image from book "StarOffice 8 Writer. You can see StarOffice 8 in action in Figure 7.9.

image from book
Figure 7.9: StarOffice 8 Writer running on the Fedora Linux desktop

Accessing Exchange with a Web Browser

So far you've seen two potential alternatives to Microsoft Office. However, neither of these includes an e-mail client, let alone one with support for group scheduling and other calendar features found in Microsoft Outlook.

How can we fill this gap? The simplest option: Microsoft Exchange offers a very good web interface. Not only does this provide e-mail access, but also calendaring, contacts, and so forth. This interface is called Outlook Web Access (OWA), and you only need a web browser to get to it.

Microsoft has chosen to implement two web interfaces, depending on the web browser connecting to it. A "premium" interface and a "basic" interface are automatically chosen. The premium interface, which comes close to the full feature set of the Outlook application, appears only when Internet Explorer is detected . The basic interface is presented to all other browsers. While some support for calendaring and contact management is included, it is not as complete or as friendly as the premium interface.

Accessing Outlook Web Access is simplicity itself. Just access http://exchange2003.ad.corp.com/exchange/ and log in with your Active Directory username and password when prompted. You can do so from Firefox on a Linux client. It doesn't get much easier than that. See Figure 7.10 for an example of the appearance of the basic interface of Outlook Web Access as shown when running Firefox on a Linux client.

image from book
Figure 7.10: Accessing the Exchange server via Outlook Web Access with the Firefox browser on a Linux Client

Evolution

Evolution is a full Linux e-mail client. This application has strong support for Exchange, including scheduling and contacts as well as the obvious e-mail features.

Evolution is sponsored by Novell, so it's built in to Novell's desktop product. You can find out about that at www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/evolution.html .

The Evolution project is open source, managed as part of the GNOME project, and the official community development site can be found at http://gnome.org/projects/evolution/ .

Evolution is included as "standard equipment" with Fedora Core 3. Evolution, out of the box, can connect to a variety of mail server types. In the last chapter, we set up IMAP services on Exchange. Theoretically, you could simply pull your mail via IMAP from the Exchange server. However, Evolution's secret weapon is that it also has WebDAV support. WebDAV, which stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning," is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol used by web browsers and servers. WebDAV extends HTTP by adding support for collaborative editing and version control of files by a large number of users. Microsoft added support for WebDAV access to Exchange in Exchange 2000. Evolution takes advantage of that support to provide Exchange compatibility. That opens the door to groupware features, such as appointment scheduling, that can't be implemented with IMAP alone. However, Fedora Core 3 doesn't install the connector by default when installing Evolution.

We can add the Evolution Exchange connector using the familiar Add/Remove Applications tool by following these steps on the adlincli1.ad.corp.com Linux system:

  1. Select Applications image from book Settings.

  2. Choose the Add/Remove Applications tool.

  3. Scroll down to "Graphical Internet" and click "Details."

  4. On the "Extra Packages" list, check "Evolution Connector."

  5. Click "Close" to return to the "Package Management" screen.

  6. Click "Update." After a delay, the "Completed System Preparation" dialog appears.

  7. Click "Continue" to begin the installation process.

  8. Insert CDs when and if prompted, as usual.

  9. Click "OK" when the installation is complete.

  10. Click "Quit" to leave the Add/Remove Applications tool.

Now log out of the desktop environment and log in as any Active Directory user you likefor instance, salesperson1 .

Since the Exchange connector is now installed, you can launch Evolution from the Application menu and select Internet image from book Mail.

Configuration occurs when you fire up Evolution the first time. This wizard-driven process happens separately for each user who wants to use Evolution. The first main screen of the wizard can be seen in Figure 7.11.

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Figure 7.11: Once the Evolution-Exchange connector is installed, Microsoft Exchange is an available server type.

There are several pages of the wizard, depending on the configuration options. In Figure 7.11, we've entered in the name of the Exchange server and provided our user's name.

Evolution, unfortunately, is not yet kerberized and does not attempt to use the credentials of a user who has authenticated against Active Directory when logging into the desktop environment, so you will be prompted for a password. You will also be prompted for quite a bit of other information that an Outlook user would never have to provide manually, such as the global catalog server name.

In Figure 7.12, we've configured the global catalog server and the Active Directory server, windc1.ad.corp.com , are one and the same. However, you only need to provide this information once.

image from book
Figure 7.12: Specifying the global catalog server on the second page of the Evolution Exchange Connector Account Setup Wizard.

The last two pages of the wizard are very easy: just accept the default settings on the "Sending E-mail" and "Account Management" pages.

When you complete the wizard, click "Send/Receive" to fetch your mail from the Exchange server. Congratulations, you've integrated a Linux client into a Microsoft Exchange environment!

Note that, to see your Exchange email, you'll need to expand sales person1@corp.com in the tree of folders on the left. Then expand "Personal Folders" and finally "Inbox". By default, Evolution displays salesperson1's mail spool on the local workstation, which is not what we want.

Linux-Hosted Calendaring Servers

We feel as if there was a meeting in the last four or five years , and we missed it. In this meeting, people all agreed to take the noun "calendar" and turn it into the verb "calendaring." Collectively, we could have used the word "scheduling" but apparently that word wasn't "techy" sounding enough.

Anyway, calendaring is a big deal, and Exchange is King of the Calendar. That is, many organizations count on Exchange to schedule their people in various meetings and meeting rooms. And, as you saw in the last example, the Evolution connector does a good job making Linux talk with the backend Exchange box. The Evolution client can manipulate calendar information stored on Exchange, including "free/busy" appointment lists. Outlook Web Access provides an alternative way to access this information.

When your servers run Windows, Outlook and Exchange make up the definitive calendar solution. Outlook Web Access and/or Evolution provides the Linux client piece of the puzzle. But what about Linux-hosted and cross-platform alternatives to Exchange? Sometimes, these alternatives are called groupware , usually to refer to Exchange-like mail plus calendaring solutions.

There are several open source efforts to provide a full alternative to Exchange Server. None of these are quite as mature as we'd like, and none are officially part of Fedora Core 3 as of this writing. In addition, since the open source groupware solutions tend to be made up of many different open source components , installation is challenging. Each of the Linux calendaring servers we looked at requires particular versions of many packages, including specific versions of databases, MTAs, and POP servers. That means installing far too many non-Fedora packages from source code. For now, we present an overview of these options to fill you in on what's happening in the Linux-hosted calendaring world.

OpenGroupware

The OpenGroupware project, also known as OGO (not to be confused with the handheld device of the same name), aims to produce "the leading open source groupware server to integrate with the leading open source office suite products and all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms." OpenGroupware offers an Outlook connector, ZideStore, raising the possibility of hosting all calendars on the Linux side. OpenGroupware also offers a demonstration CD based on the Knoppix distribution of Linux. You just put the CD in the PC, boot from the CD, and off you go. Nothing is written directly to disk, which makes trying out OpenGroupware significantly simpler than experimenting with the other projects mentioned here. You can find more information about the OpenGroupware project at www.opengroupware.org/ .

Kolab

Kolab is another groupware server project, seeking to provide full and equal support for the KDE desktop's Kontact client, Outlook (with a connector called Toltec), and a web interface. The Toltec Connector software is proprietary software with a price tag, as of this writing.

Kolab was originally launched by a group of German companies who received a contract with the German government to develop a better cross-platform calendaring solution. That particular contract has ended, but Kolab development continues as an open source project. You can find more information about Kolab at www.kolab.org/ .

Hula

The creators of the Hula project are "focused on building a calendar and mail server that people love to use ," instead of "a 'groupware server' that managers want to deploy." To that end, they have emphasized simplicity and, at this stage, a primarily web-based interface. They have also emphasized scalability. The Hula project claims to support large numbers of concurrent users on a single server.

However, Hula is not mature calendaring software. As of this writing, Hula supports calendaring only for web-based access, and there is no active project to create an Outlook connector for Hula.

Hula deserves points for a single-rpm installation and very few dependencies. Documentation is still in the early stages. You can learn more about Hula at www.hula-project.org/ .

Novell has also recently announced that they are throwing developmental resources toward Hula, so this may be one to watch.

OpenXChange

The OpenXChange project, which is also backed by Novell, is intended to become a full-fledged alternative to Microsoft Exchange. In fact, OpenXChange now offers an Outlook connector, making it a potentially viable alternative to Exchange for those with a mixture of Linux and Windows clients.

The Outlook connector is not open source and, as of this writing, it is unclear what the final terms will be when a stable, production-quality version of OpenXChange is released. OpenXChange also works with Linux groupware clients such as KDE's Kontact, but OpenXChange is not convenient to install on Fedora Core 3 systems and documentation remains immature and incomplete. However, the recent release of the Outlook connector shows that OpenXChange development is very active and great things can be expected in the near future. You can learn more at www.open-xchange.org/ (note the hyphen).

Linux Client and Stand-Alone Calendar Software

Of course, not every organization uses a shared calendaring solution. If your needs extend only to individual private calendars, you have several Linux-based options. Windows users will typically use Outlook, but they may also use the free, cross-platform Sunbird calendar software as described in this section. We'll look at each of the major offerings. Doing so also gives us a chance to say more about clients we've mentioned previously with regard to particular group- ware servers they support.

Evolution

Evolution, as mentioned earlier, is an open source calendar and e-mail client included with Fedora Core 3. Evolution can manage local calendars as well as Exchange-hosted calendars and so deserves mention here.

Sunbird

This Mozilla project, which stands behind the Firefox browser, has more recently launched an effort to create a new standalone calendar program. Sunbird is still in an early version as of this writing, but already offers stable releases with good local calendar support. It is also possible to publish calendars to a WebDAV server and to subscribe to calendars published by others in this way, creating a simple "poor man's groupware" solution. More information about Sunbird is available from www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird.html .

Kontact

Kontact is the KDE project's e-mail and calendaring client. Kontact can interoperate with several groupware servers, including Kolab and OpenXChange. Some support for Microsoft Exchange is provided, but Kontact's support for Exchange is both incomplete and unsupported as of this writing. To learn more about Kontact, you can visit www.kontact.org/ .



Windows and Linux Integration. Hands-on Solutions for a Mixed Environment
Windows And Linux Integration Hands-on Solutions for a Mixed Environment - 2005 publication.
ISBN: B003JFRFG0
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 71

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