Re: Fwd: Intro: TML IT Personal & Info: Open Office tools Security || features Comparison || Compatibility

[Andrea Pescetti <pe...@apache.org>]

anand.vasappanavara wrote:
> I had written to Andrea for a getting in touch
> with our IT Senior staff as mentioned in the forwarded mail below. This
> is regarding obtaining permissions to use the tool (Open Office) for
> professional work by our employees at Advanced Engineering department at
> Tata Motors Pune India.

Hi, please note that you have written to several mailing lists, 
dev@openoffice.apache.org is always enough.

> I hence request you please remind Andrea to respond with the queries at
> the earliest to enable us to install the software on our PC's and start
> working with it at the earliest.

I will gladly answer your queries, and feel free to follow up with 
private conversations if you prefer, but please remember that I don't 
provide (gratis or paid) consultancy services around OpenOffice and 
therefore there should be no expectations that I answer a message sent 
on Saturday morning by Sunday night (or even by the next Saturday): it 
might happen, but it might not. E-mailing a public channel, like you are 
doing now, is best for generic support. Relying on professional 
consultants is another option if you need tailored support.

> Can you let me know when will Open
> Office 4 be available for download ?

The latest plans were posted to this list and aim around June 2013.

>     * I had communicated to you a while ago about the security issue
>       related to these tools, can you throw light on it again. Mr
>       Tarnekar & his team may interact with you further before giving us
>       a go ahead.

If I recall correctly from previous conversations on this list, you were 
especially interested in disclosure of private data. I confirm that 
services that connect to the Internet (such as the update notification 
service) do not disclose personal private data or documents data.

And for software vulnerabilities, the project follows the standard best 
practices (private reporting, confidential fixes, CVEs, fixes in the 
first available release or a dedicated point release): but this part is 
so confidential that I don't have access to it, so if you need more 
information on this keep asking the dev@openoffice.apache.org list and 
if there is anything that can be disclosed the relevant people will do it.

>     * Are there any licensing issues when Open Office tools are used at
>       the whole enterprise level rather than used individually.

The license makes no difference. Check for yourself at 
http://www.openoffice.org/license.html

>     * Can you provide us a feature comparison table of the latest Open
>       Office suite tools with respect to the Microsoft Office tools (Ex
>       Pivot table functionality in Calc).

This highly depends on your usage of Office and OpenOffice. It is often 
said that users use about 20% of the Office (or OpenOffice) 
functionality, but that 20% is different for each use case, so 
compatibility in general is good (and yes, Calc supports Pivot tables 
and related functionality) but details may vary depending on your 
specific use case. This is one of the fields where a professional 
consultant might be helpful.

>     * Can you provide us with any known compatibility issues between
>       open office tools & Microsoft office tools. (Ex Open Office Write
>       file opening in MS Word & vice versa for editing/manipulating).

This is mostly the same issue, but in this case we maintain a list of 
fidelity improvements that you can find at
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Fidelity_Improvement_Since_AOO341
and shows that we are continuously working towards better interoperability.

Regards,
   Andrea.